#redefining myself

inheritance of failure

and broken dreams

and the crushing weight

of feeling unworthy.

I was raised on gender roles

and flawed philosophies,

and the expectation

of living up to nothing more

than obediently reproducing.

I've clawed my way

to the surface slowly,

desperate to be something,

desperate to prove to myself

that I am not a waste,

That my life has valid meaning.

I am more than my resume,

I am more than my upbringing,

I am more than the things

that define me.

I am not

Currently reassessing my faith choices. I’m really frustrated right now, and am looking to shake things up a bit. I won’t be able to really be open to some people (family) about what I want to become, because their own faiths see anything outside of the orthodox needing to be converted or re-converted. I don’t want to post publicly my reasons for reassessing my faith, but I am finally feeling the peace I have been looking for while searching for something that better reflects what I feel in my soul towards the universe.

I think I’ve been on the long track to get to this point. But I’m asking for some help. You don’t have to repost this, or reply to this publicly. You can even ignore this post. But if you want to, can you PM me (or email me if you have that) with what you believe, why you believe it, and how you practice your faith? I have some ideas of what I want to become, and while I have friends that range from atheist to almost every branch of established faith/religion (Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Pagan, Wiccan, Buddhist, etc), most have been just as private as I have about their practices, which I respect and honor.

(warning, rambling stream of consciousness...)

I’ve written a bit about closure and normalization. But over the last few weeks I’ve come to realize that it’s a moving target. And perhaps one without a bullseye.

I’m still struggling with finding a post-career, cancery-life, “new normal.” Unlike retirement, I didn’t plan for (on) this and the decision to stop working came somewhat suddenly. It’s been quite an awakening as to just how much work had dominated my life. Career & work… Isn't it interesting how we use these words to try and compartmentalize what in many cases is really the driving force in our lives? 

Maybe the illusion of compartmentalization is universal? How else could so many of us allow a “job” to rule our lives? Ask anyone who knows me well and I think they would say that I was someone who had a full life outside of work. But despite that, the job always won out in the end. If there was a project that needed completing (and there were always projects…) or some other “important” thing that needed to get done, I did it. For many years running, I never used all of my vacation and often had more than half of it left to carry over into the following year. I kept telling myself I was saving up for the “big trip” but never got around to taking it. 

Even after I was diagnosed and should have been totally focused on my own needs, I allowed work to keep running my life. I had two major surges in aggressive disease activity that may have been driven in a large part by excessive work stress. Yup, I can be a slow learner…

I would tell myself that working was the best way to keep my mind off the fact that I had stage IV disease and ultimately, a terminal diagnosis. Now in retrospect, what the hell was I thinking?.. That somehow my job was going to make it all go away? Or that I could keep going on like this was just a “chronic” disease? Even more troubling, that I was somehow so important to the “institution” that it trumped my health? And was it that important to my self esteem? All of these questions have been swirling around in my head as I try to make sense out of the whole thing. 

Several months ago my buddy Tim who is a Professor of Philosophy, used his considerable skills of reasoning to convince me that my worries about going out on disability were unfounded. I had managed to go off on a moral tangent, thinking that I wasn’t sick enough to become a “burden” on society… And I was also rambling on about how important my "work" was. His arguments being that one; I have stage IV cancer and it didn’t matter if I was still (mostly) physically able to work and two; the institution wouldn’t really care that I was gone. He wasn’t talking about the people I worked with but rather the actual institution, the “thing” that I worked for. Talk about stopping dead in my tracks.

I was already starting to come around to the first argument thanks to the frequent reminders from my Oncology team but number two, that was something I hadn’t considered. It wasn’t that I saw myself as irreplaceable but I rather that I felt I was contributing to something important, something bigger than myself so to speak. But his words cut right through all that. “It,” the institution, would just keep right on going without missing a beat.

People would miss me, and things would change because of my absence but my contributions would begin to fade to the point of becoming nothing more than passing memories. How could it be any different? That’s how the world works whether we want to face up to it or not. It goes back to that Buddhist thing I’ve talked about so often, impermanence. My career was just as impermanent as everything thing else. It ended with no fanfare or accolades (the kind of stuff we aspired to in academia…), no gold watch or retirement, I just quietly slipped away. And now? Now I’ll fade from the institutional memory. It's already happening.