Dealing with Discouragement

First Crack at Serious Self-Portrait

There is nothing to be overly discouraged about brain surgery. Honestly, it is a beautiful thing to be able to take care of a tumor, benign or malignant, in one’s head in 21st century America. There’s been vast improvement in the last couple of decades. Since I started talking and writing about the experience I have sensed the need to be open about everything that has happened, if for no other reason than to point to this truth. That statistics point to survival of this surgery at 98% should make this obvious, but the responses ran the gamut from hand-wringing despair to joyful prayer. It is simply hard to imagine opening up the skull and having a decent experience without those prayers, but the techniques and technology are pretty impressive.

This is not to say that discouragement doesn’t exist. Anyone who has read this blog for a while knows well that I have had some real downer moments. It wasn’t so much the surgery itself, but my body’s reaction to some of the preparation, and my mind’s genuine impatience and control freakishness with everything. Now that I’m five weeks out and clearly doing well, I can talk about some of the setbacks I’ve had in recovery without jumping up and down hysterically over them.

An obvious one, to me, is that I’m having a time with writing. I know what I want to write, but getting it out coherently is a real challenge. It’s not the big things. I think that the big, overall ideas are coming out okay, but, sentence-by-sentence, I am recently shocked by how difficult some of them are to read. What I’m used to taking for granted, words flowing out of my brain, I now have to take a step back from and wait for some clarity. It is as if everything I’m writing comes out a bit convoluted, and it horrifies me. I’m sorry about that because in social media, blogging, and poetry I’m used to shooting from the hip.  When I go back and read some response or even a blog, and realize I used the wrong word, or forgot grammar altogether so that the meaning had drained out of the words I got right, or just used to many redundancies, it is discouraging. The time it took to write seemed so blasted long before, that now I am a bit intimidated to start the projects I have in mind until this settles down.

I hope it settles down.

Additionally, I’ll tell you, I’m wondering if this has always been the case (convolution in my writing), in fact. Is it possible that it only just now that I’m becoming aware of it because the obstruction has been taken away? That’s possible. That would explain a lot about my career. That makes my hands sweat, just considering it.

That may be why I'm so happy to be doing visual art instead, and that's not too bad a trade at the moment.

While Cottonwoods Sleep

Then there are the issues of swelling around nerves, facial and tongue numbness paired with pain zapping and dry eye (only one dry eye). They don’t really tell you that in any surgery they’re likely to strike some nerves and push them out of balance one way or another. It happens, and mostly it simply takes some time to heal.

How do nerves heal, you may wonder. Well, I wondered, too, because I figured if I had an idea of how the nerves reset, or heal then I might be able to support the process and feel less worried about it. My research led me in many directions as usual. Perhaps, more importantly, I have cause to simply pay attention to the process unfolding, because some days it really bothers me and some days I forget about it.

So, guess, what? I’m writing about nerves and emotional turns, and it’s going to take me at least a week to put it down straight enough to post comfortably. In the meantime, enjoy the burst of spring this weekend, if it is happening near you, and be truly thankful for your face and tears and even runny allergic noses.

revisiting patience for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle. And so we must straighten our backs and work for our freedom. A man can't ride you unless your back is bent.Martin Luther King, Jr.

Today I was confronted by benign impatience. It was meant to be harmless, poking fun at the serious history lesson of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the fact that we the people got this extra holiday. It seems not everyone is on board. The Governor of Maine changed his mind about it, as did many others. Why, if we have a black President, do we need to be reminded of our heinous, racist past all the time? Why indeed? Wouldn't it be so much better to simply put the holocaust behind us? Wouldn't it be so much better if we forgot the time when women were legally beaten by their husbands and didn't have the right to vote in this country? Wouldn't it be better to forget that the children of America once worked in sweatshops? Wouldn't it be better to wipe the memory of every mining disaster that ever happened?

These were not necessarily overtly racist, bigoted people posing this question about MLK Day, and unintentionally implying all the rest. Their world works for them and they assume we're pointing fingers, I suppose, when we say, "the work is not complete."

They would like for us to say something else like, "Good job! Your world is such a great example. It's enough simply for you to live well, to teach your children to live well,  and to isolate yourself from the things that don't seem to be working, as if they are stinky piles of offending garbage." Of course, we cannot say that. Then they attack the principle of the day on the grounds of truth. It seems to be getting worse.

There are many people still left behind. What's with that? Worse yet, it seems like there is a new crop of virulent racist, misogynist and classist groups emerging. There are conspiracies and domestic terrorists, and there are drug wars and high unemployment. There are homeless people in America. There are CRAZY people with guns. There's SLAVERY in this day and age, in America, for goodness sakes. What's with that, if Dr. King did such a good job? Why shouldn't we ignore history? Fat lot of good it does for us if no one ever feels better.

The movements of Dr. King, Mahatma Gandhi, and others in the pursuit of non-violent change had one major thing in common: patience.

So, I've been trying to explain to myself why I believe that we should stay on course with revealing our history and putting neon arrows over the suffering of today. As one friend, Libby Pratt, said, "Silence only enables the oppressor." Talking about our true human condition and acting upon it comes down to patience. Not benign, inactive patience, but patient struggle.

It seems to me that it is no longer socially acceptable in many circles to be overtly racist, sexist and classist. People dance around their own beliefs about superiority apologetically when they slip up, but for the most part know, even in their discomfort with it, that it is questionable to believe in anything besides equality. Some are simply trying to talk themselves into agreement and some really do believe the tenets of equality. The places where it never is mentioned, liberal places and conservative places alike, are a bubble of believing that these real inequalities and injustices no longer exist and so when the media takes a few weeks at the beginning of the year to shine the light on unpleasant memories and present terrible realities, the people living in the bubbles literally have to experience their own denial. It's really disturbing to anyone to have to acknowledge one's own denial and the remedy for it often is, like a hangover, to get back to denial as quickly and seamlessly as possible. We are, as a culture, drunk with denial.

The other thing about these behaviors becoming less acceptable on a broad scale is that people who adhere to them are becoming increasingly isolated. Their worlds exist under the radar of popular culture. This is both good and bad. It's good because the balance seems tipped towards edging these distorted belief systems out of society. It's bad because if they're hiding most of the time, then we feel comfortable being half asleep about their existence. We feel justified in believing that they're outnumbered therefore irrelevant. They are not irrelevant. Not only are they very dangerous, they are our own shadows. Full of fear, angered by the perception of loss of opportunity, they're arming themselves to the teeth and they thrive on hate. Until we bring them into the light of loving kindness and acceptance (notice I did not use the word tolerance), then they will continue to frustrate our denial with shoot-outs at the local grocery stores.

Patient struggle is all that it implies: not easy, not quick and possibly never-ending. Patient struggle is what I do in order to write. Patient struggle is what parent's routinely do to teach their child as much as they can before sending them out into this difficult world. Patient struggle is what Dr. King was about. We cannot afford to be impatient.