Sorry, I’m a little late.
Last week, I said this post would focus on surgery/surgeries. I also said I would write every week. The lie detector test determined that was a lie, and that was also a lie. I’m behind schedule on post two, but let me tell you why.
See, I’ve been in this play. Like as an actor. This week was opening week. I also had medical appointments. I also had a class to plan for. Life happened and this blog got postponed. Hopefully, reader, you can forgive me.
The good news is that my ct scan showed no progression of cancer. The good news is that I acted my little heart out in front of an audience, and felt for the first time that very specific energy that an actor receives from a responsive audience. The energy is similar but different from giving a reading, making a speech, giving a talk, conducting a lecture, running a discussion — all things I’ve done before. And there’s something strangely holy about the interplay of human beings on a stage.
One night, rehearsing in the theater, I couldn’t help but feel momentarily overwhelmed by the sense that I was part of something deep and ancient. I couldn’t help but think back, with compassion, on generations before me and the connection between storytelling and the human spirit. I mean, since the ancient Greeks, the show has gone on. Though the basic suffering of living, and through he suffering others might bring our way, and through the storms of history humans have told stories, performed, considered the desires of an audience.
And there I was in 2024, a year I never thought I’d live to see. There I was making theater — stage iv cancer, heartbreak, political unrest, unimaginable human suffering and yet the show must go on. It absolutely must.
A little less than two years ago, I was a public school teacher in Arizona. A little less than two years ago, my spouse ghosted me of a Sunday morning. In the aftermath, I had to confront some very hurtful, scary, heartbreaking truths about my marriage (r.i.p.), and do so while learning for the very first time how to live as an American living at/below the poverty line.
As one who has lived the life of a writer and teacher (ie. of very modest means), I felt like the least likely person to ever have to utter the words: “I am financially ruined.” I never broke any laws. Never cheated on my taxes. Couldn’t even steal a single Swedish Fish from the bin at the dime store even though it felt, that day in the super retro 1980s, all the nine year old pressure in the world was at my back.
I was disastrously bad at money during my twenties, got cancer in my early thirties which put me further in debt, and was just trying to get real and responsible about money when I entered into a marriage with a bad credit score, no more than a couple thousand dollars in savings, and virtually no financial literacy. My first book was about to launch, and I’d amassed nearly ten years teaching at the post-secondary level. That’s all I had going for me in terms of “capital”/financial worth. What I’m saying is that while the kind of real, true poverty I fell into post-divorce was stunning and new, it was really only like three rungs down the ladder from where I was when my ex found me.
What I mean is that I have always been dumb about money. Being dumb about money among Americans is dangerous. I have learned my lesson. I know this now.
Nothing — and I mean nothing — had prepared me to even guess at what was about to happen in my divorce. I mean, divorce yes. I knew something like over half of people who get married get divorced. But this divorce, even by witness accounts, was unlike any I’d known of, heard of, read about in books, or seen in movies.
I did not know what to do after my ex left, and the money was gone, and I had an incurable disease. Life is this way. We find ourselves in the situations we never imagined, or if we imagined them we didn’t think we could survive them, and no amount of money or fame or even love can quite help you endure them in your mind and soul, tons of poetry has been written on this very thing, this very human experience of “what the fuck just happened to my life?” And during the early days of trying to find ropes and rafts to hang onto, I started reading The Dhammapada (it’s a collection of Buddha’s teachings), and I found this teaching, and it read, “You are like a yellow leaf. You have no provisions for your journey.”
And the recognition I felt in the simile, in the idea of having no provisions for this little span between birth and death when we are all yellow leaves, who have never been yellow leaves before, and there are no instructions — the recognition I felt in that moment, winter 2022, in that place and time in my life? It is still reverberating inside of me.
So I have found some provisions for the journey. Some I was taught, others I sought out and learned on my own, and I want to write about this, too. And I think as someone who went from semi-nihilist to spiritual in the course of about two years, I have things to say about this.
And yes. I know. I know. “Woman with stage iv cancer gets spiritual — shocker at 10!” But I don’t think this is the story you think it might be. I’m not religious. I’m Buddhist, but I also like a little of all of it? I think maybe I’m a spiritual Whateverian — as in “whatever, so long as it’s true, wise, and good.” I don’t believe in heaven and I don’t believe in hell, though I’ve sent many to both places in my mind, and when I say “god,” which I sometimes do, I do not mean to suggest a single entity, a deity, some man with a beard in clouds. I mean the energy that binds us and sustains us, and to which I believe we must return when we die.
Now that the awkward spiritual/religious stuff is out of the way, now that maybe you have a better understanding of why I want to keep this blog, you may tell your friends to subscribe, or you may unsubscribe, or maybe you’re reading this and you knew me back when and you are thinking, “Who is this and what did she do to Gruber?” That last one I get a lot, in varying forms.
I had to change, though, in order to save myself from myself. I had to change in order to live a happy, peaceful, meaningful life and after I got back from Arizona, that is all I wanted. It’s still all I want, and in so many ways I’ve already achieved this just by taking the time to get honest, ask for help, and treat myself with the same compassion I have always tried (and often failed) to treat others. Long before I knew words like “compassion” or could think philosophically about anything at all, I did have a sense I could not articulate a first; a sense that if we met everyone we saw, we’d all be less likely to hurt one another. Maybe I got it from my grandmas. Maybe from Mr. Rogers.
And I want to write about these things here, too.
I promise to write next week. Likely on the topic of surgery, now that my schedule has opened up more. I do hope you continue to read.
Until then, be good.