Weekly Happy: Bursts of Sunlight

There are many positives to living in Washington, DC, and the excellent metro system is one. Today I was taking the Yellow Line from where I live in Columbia Heights to King Street in Alexandria, Virginia. I rarely ride the Yellow line out of the District, so I was pleasantly reminded about the above-ground bridge over the Potomac River. For a brief minute, you are out of the dark underground tunnel and able to see the beautiful sights of the DC waterfront. Today, this bridge crossing was particularly smile-inducing, because of the sun, blue sky, and crowds of people out and about enjoying the last of the cherry blossoms and the trails hugging the river. Of course, just as you’ve become hypnotized by the Washington and Jefferson monuments and warmed by the sun, you drift back underground, but it makes that brief moment all-the-more magical.

Someone was asking in the Young Survival Coalition Facebook group if anyone had advice to get her through treatment, and one thing I might offer would be to enjoy the small moments when you feel happy. They might be few and far between, but they do happen and it is worth your time to bask in them before they disappear. One such moment, for me, was the week after my first chemotherapy infusion. I had just left my follow-up doctor appointment and was walking through a warm, May day in DC, amazed at how good I felt despite all that was going on. In that moment, I felt strong enough to get through the whole ordeal, and I still remember that happy feeling to this day.

Oh, I guess I should also mention that, since my last post, I hit my two-years-cancer-free mark. It was April 5, 2011, when the tumor was cut out of my right breast. Yay!?!

Come Blog About Death

http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2013/03/26/175383540/why-more-patients-should-blog-about-illness-and-death?ft=1&f=1001

I kind of want to say “Duh” to this article, but I know that there are a lot of people out there who have terminal illnesses who probably don’t think at all about writing. And that makes sense… because having a terminal illness gives you way more important stuff to think about.

But, for me, writing is and always has been therapeutic, so it’s awesome to see it validated by NPR, even if it’s just anecdotal for now (get on it, researchers).

Speaking of writing, my weekly happy for this week was going through old school papers in my bedroom at my parents’ house. They recently painted so all of my things were in boxes and I had to decide what to keep and what to throw away. I wrote many stories in high school and college, but I haven’t written regularly in a while. Reading old stories made me surprised at how eloquent I was and inspired to write more.

Last week, I sat in a cafe and churned out a couple paragraphs of creative writing. It felt awesome and I realized how much I missed it. Unfortunately, I also realized how bad I was at plot. I can do expository ’til the cows come home but putting together a coherent story with a beginning, middle, and end is really hard for me. Something to work on in my spare time, which I have a lot of now that I’m unemployed.

I leave you with the first paragraph of the story I wrote last week, inspired by a guy I saw out the window of a bus:

Karl bashed a cigarette butt against the stone sidewalk of 16^th Street with the heel of his worn sneaker. Crowds of tourists wandered past, lost on their quest for the White House. Though Karl knew the damned thing was just two blocks away, he didn’t dare speak to these cheerful families lest they try to start up a conversation about the beauty of the capital in springtime.

Estoy Aquí

Contemplating Cuenca

I am home from Ecuador a bit early. I had planned to be traveling for seven weeks, but alas I only traveled for four. It was a great run – so many empowering moments for me and a lot of self-reflection, which was the whole point. But I got tired of the backpacking style – living out of one bag that I had to pack and repack each time I was leaving a place, hauling my pack on long and dreary bus rides, staying in some dimly lit lodgings, etc. Mostly, though, I was lonely. I met some great people, of course, but the nature of my trip was such that I was in each place for a couple days and then I moved on, and people were rarely moving on in the same direction I was, so each couple of days I had to say goodbye and head off to meet new people who I would say goodbye to in a couple of days.

Late one night, as I was stewing in my own anxiety about an upcoming 8-hour bus ride across the border from Ecuador into Peru, I realized I just wanted to go home. What fun is traveling if you have no one to share it with, or if you’re going to work yourself up into a debilitating anxiety each time you have to do something difficult? It really didn’t seem worth it anymore.

I was surprised at how at-peace I was with my decision, though. Much of my self-realization on the trip was focused on how much I beat myself up over things that I don’t do or don’t do “right”. I expected to feel really disappointed in myself for what others might view as “giving up”. I met so many others who were backpacking alone for months at a time. What was wrong with me that I couldn’t do the same? Was I not flexible enough, or adventurous enough, or outgoing enough? Why didn’t I eat guinea pig or jump off a bridge or completely change up my plans or all manner of other things that backpackers did?

My “aha” moment was this: who cares that I didn’t do those things? I am myself, not other person, and I need to be okay with that. It’s so much easier to beat ourselves down about the things we aren’t doing than it is to build ourselves up about what we are doing, especially when we constantly see things on Facebook or Pinterest or YouTube that would suggest that other people are living lives much more epic than our own.

But for most people, life is about 5% epic and 95% normal (at least by other people’s standards) and so making sure that you’re happy with your non-epic moments seems a lot more important than striving to make everything epic, right?

This is not to say that I don’t want to have dreams. I still want to travel to India and sing on a Broadway stage, and I think having cancer made me feel like there was no time to accomplish my dreams so I had to do everything RIGHT NOW, and that caused me a lot of anxiety because, realistically, you can’t accomplish all of your dreams at once and sometimes you can’t even accomplish them at all. So I would like, instead, to focus on being satisfied with what each day brings because life’s too short to be anxious and disappointed.

And this is why I’m starting a new project on my blog, which is to check in each week with something that I did that made me happy. I’ll call it my “weekly happy”, and along with my own posts I’d love to hear from my dear readers with their weekly happy, too.