This one was hard. Much harder even than I thought it would be. But there it is, my cancer binder – formerly known as the Elephant – pared down, organized and on the shelf. I rule.
Before I tell the tale of how that happened, I have to take a moment and give a shout-out to one of my favorite speakers, Lisa Nichols, because she is the reason I tackled the Elephant in the first place. I first discovered her when I read The Secret, and I’ve kept track of her ever since. I’ve subscribed to and unsubscribed from a bunch of different inspirational speakers over the years, but I’ve always kept her around, because every couple of months she’d say something that changed my whole approach. I always hear her voice when I use the term ‘unwavering faith’, it’s like honey in my mind. I don’t know, there’s just something about her.
Last year I joined something called Power Week, from her Motivating the Masses platform. It required me to get onto a thirty minute call every morning at 7:00am for 7 days. That’s not a particularly easy time for me, because 7:00am is when I get the kids up for school, but I did it. I took diligent notes, and completed every Power Action homework she gave us. I walked away with concepts like making my dreams ‘non-negotiable’, and not dimming my light for other people – which I still practice every day, and even wrote about in the second volume of Magic Without Spells.
This year I was at it again; earbuds on, my phone tucked into the waistband of my pajamas, making breakfast and putting together lunches while also trying to take notes. I had quotes from her and her guest speakers scribbled all over the house – on the grocery list, on scratch paper in the bathroom…everywhere. Sometimes I’d be trying to listen to her and also trying to bully the kids out of bed or mediate World War III because my daughter got to choose the morning TV show and my son hates My Little Pony…but I showed up every morning for that motivational boost.
So it was because of her that I decided to tackle my cancer binder. On the fourth day she gave us the Power Action to ‘organize it’. We were supposed to pick an area or a room and get it cleared out, then post before and after pictures on her Twitter and Facebook pages. I knew before she’d finished her sentence that I needed to tackle the Elephant. And I knew before I even started dinner that night that it was going to take longer than one day to complete it. I knew that organizing and putting away the Elephant was going to require me to organize and put away a lot of pain, and a lot of hard memories. I knew that it wasn’t going to be as easy as just rearranging the linen closet. It was going to suck.
So I decided to tackle it within my own tribe, instead of on the MTM platform, and posted my ‘before’ picture on this blog last week. I took a pledge to get it organized and put away. Then I went out and bought as much wine as my pantry could hold.
This is how it went…
Day One: Filled with motivation from my spontaneous and somewhat foolhardy announcement to the world that I will tackle the Elephant, I scooped up the massive pile of papers, hospital wrist bands and pamphlets and put them on the coffee table. There. I’m totally starting this.
Gawd that’s a lot of paper. Maybe I’ll just start with the receipts, which don’t necessarily bring up the hardest memories, and go from there. Ooh look, there’s a marathon of Castle on TNT right now…
Day Two: It’s still on the coffee table. I managed to get 5 pieces of paper into the ‘shred’ pile, and recycle the pamphlet about breast implants. I had to keep the little card that specifies exactly what type of implants I have though – I think it might be intended to go in my wallet, but I’m not sure why. Maybe in case I’m in an accident and one of my implants gets damaged…or if I’m the victim of a mysterious murder, they can use the serial numbers to identify me – they do that on Bones and Castle all the time. Except that if they’re searching through my wallet they’ll already have several pieces of ID, they won’t need that little card. I don’t know, I think I’m supposed to keep it though so it’s now sitting next to my purse.
Day Three: The Elephant is staring at me, as though it knows I’m purposefully avoiding it. I moved it back onto the pool table because the kids were starting to use the pamphlets as placemats. Now I get that horrible feeling at the pit of my stomach every time I pass it, like when it’s April 14th and I haven’t done my taxes. Okay, I’m going to move it onto my bed so that I can’t ignore it.
Day Four: My neck hurts from sleeping on the couch last night. For the record, I did not sleep on the couch on purpose, but every time I thought about getting up and moving the Elephant to go to sleep, I thought, “One more show, then I’ll do it” and eventually drifted off during an infomercial for zit cream. This is getting ridiculous, it’s not a term paper that I can make up an excuse for. Thousands of people are expecting me to have this finished in a few days. Okay maybe hundreds. Or dozens.
Day Five: Success! I separated all the receipts into one pile. I can’t decide whether I should keep any of the Welcome To Cancer pamphlets though. On one hand I don’t need that very tidy information peppered in between the cheesy stock photos…but on the other hand, the pamphlet for chemo hats is what sparked the conversation with my kids about my diagnosis. Do I keep that for the memory? Uch…
Day Six, 7:00am: I have two more days to not only tackle the Elephant but write a blog about it. Great, I’ve managed to re-create the weekend before every college paper I was ever supposed to write. My stomach hurts when I think about it, both because it’s an assignment and I hate assignments (I mean come on, the word starts with ‘ass’), but also because…well it’s the Elephant. It hasn’t been sitting there collecting dust for over a year because it’s filled with fantastic memories.
The kids are at their daddy’s today, so I won’t be interrupted. I can spread out and take over an entire section of the room if I need to. I can sit and cry into my chicken jalapeno Lean Pocket if I’m so inclined. I can also decide that happy hour starts at noon. Okay.
9:30am: Crap. Crap crap crap I forgot I have a 6-month follow-up appointment with my plastic surgeon today at 10am. Guess I won’t be showing off how long my hair is, since it’s going to have to go under a hat…
3:30pm: It’s clear that I need to make some decisions about what this binder is going to include. And to do that I have to decide what it’s for. Is it for reference? Would I hand it to someone who was newly diagnosed? God no, there’s way too much information, I’d scare the crap out of them. Would it truly be useful as a reference for writing The Memoir? Maybe. But how much of it is necessary for that? How many details do I need to keep around? And can I let this whole thing go once I’ve written about it?
9:00pm: There are so many things I forgot about – like the Neuopogen shots I had to give myself every day during chemo, and the little deep breathing apparatus they gave me after my mastectomy to clear my lungs. Is it healthy to bring all that up again? Or is there a good reason I buried those memories?
I’m going to bed.
Day Seven, 5:30am: I dreamed about going on a pilgrimage, and meeting up with old friends along the way. There was a backpack that I kept opening and closing without getting anything out, as though I was either looking for something that wasn’t there, or just checking and rechecking that I hadn’t lost it.
The bulk of the work is done on the Elephant. I decided to shred all of the receipts, since the only reason to keep them would have been to track how much the whole thing had cost me (in dollars, anyway), and that’s one thing that is very easy to let go of. The rest of it…I don’t know. Maybe it just is what it is. Maybe…I don’t know. I can’t tell how healthy it is to keep any of this, but the thought of shredding the whole thing stresses me out too. Maybe this is just the first step – organizing it and getting rid of the superfluous material. Then someday I’ll go through it again and get rid of more. Or trash the whole thing. Who knows. Today I just want to focus on the road immediately ahead of me, it’s all I can handle.
Day Eight: Well I missed my personal deadline. I probably only have an hour’s worth of work left on it but there it sits anyway. I needed a break after yesterday though – I wasn’t exactly a mess, but a little part of my brain and a little part of my heart shut down.
Day Nine: Uch.
Day Ten, 11:30am: Okay, I set up a new personal deadline – I’m going to publish this tomorrow. I’ve already done laundry, vacuumed the entire house, gone for a run, and cleaned the fishbowls…not much else I can justify doing in place of just finishing the Elephant. Oooh, lunch. I’m totally hungry…
5:25pm: Done. I squeezed in 45 minutes while my son was at baseball practice, and made nice with the hole punch. It’s not as organized inside as I’d intended, but at some point I had to give up my OCD and allow things like my office visit summaries to be out of order. Plus, if I had to do more than decide whether things went into the ‘surgery’, ‘chemo’, ‘radiation’ or ‘other’ section I’d have to read each piece of paper, and we’ve already seen that this causes large delays.
So it’s done. It’s on the shelf. Okay.
Okay.
Day Eleven: The anti-climax of finishing this project is puzzling, and yet not. I’m so conflicted when it comes to these memories – I want to forget but I don’t want to forget. Still, I thought I’d be more inspired at the end of it. I assumed I’d have this amazing, moving blog post after I was finished. But it’s just…done.
I guess the big revelation is that I have a choice about my reaction to these memories. Yeah, I freeze a bit, but I’m still technically in control. I can choose whether I have a dramatic response or I just take a breath and move on. If there’s anything I learned during treatment, it’s how to take a breath and keep going. Maybe that’s the lesson – just keep swimming.
Or perhaps it’s about faith. Unwavering faith. Faith that I am strong enough to get through all of the lessons, even the ones post-treatment. Faith that I am exactly where I am meant to be. Faith that I’m still on the right path.
Unwavering faith. Okay, it’s good enough for now.