About

The short:

Beebs finds herself cancer free, happy, and in New Zealand. Supported by her kind and ambitious young husband, she explores and enjoys the little things in life, and works on some big things (they're quite big for her). Luckily, she has a tough-taskmaster-and-advisor in one to wake up with every morning, at which point she grins, stretches her legs straight up in the air, and launches herself at him for ten minutes of snuggles. Snuggles and sunshine fuel Beebs, and she likes to get as much of these two things as possible. She is also learning to regain, or uncover, the creativity and drive that she feels she lost along with one-sixth of her brain. Join us as we follow Beeb's journey in searching for that lost brain - or enjoying the lack of it. 

Beebs' backstory

I'll admit, I thought I knew what "success" was. I had life all planned out. By 21 I had traveled around the world by train, worked in Africa twice for various NGO's, married, finished a four-year degree in three years and lived alone on the opposite side of the world since 18. 

However, grades didn't save me when headaches racked my body, and grad school didn't take me in when I had nowhere to stay for chemotherapy. As conceited as this bio seems so far, cancer brought me to my knees, and it brought me home.

My husband James and I had just presented a paper together at a conference when it happened. On the last day of the conference, I suddenly lost a considerable amount of sight in my right eye and the world became blurry. 

Of course, I attributed the abrupt onset of headaches to the inevitable worsening eyesight that comes with age, and proceeded with a road trip from San Francisco to eastern New Mexico for Thanksgiving. 

Heading into Death Valley I called my mum in New Zealand. She stopped what she was doing, and told me to go to a Neurologist. I laughed  - and called in to an Optometrist when we reached Flagstaff.


He sent me straight to the Emergency Room.

For the next two weeks, I was bedridden with excruciating spinal headaches from a botched lumbar puncture (or five lumbar punctures, should I say). Fear crept up on me at night wondering what it could be. 

Seattle, the city that saved me

The pain was at once terrible, and due to a series of events, fortunate, as it led us to our third Emergency Room in Seattle on the way home. There, I was admitted to the hospital and long story short, a week later I was under the surgical knife to have my right frontal lobe removed.

And, with about 45 separate medical bills in tow, I came home to New Zealand.

Cancer was too heavy a burden to shoulder alone, and blogging helped me share it. This blog served that purpose, allowing me to explore the cancer journey in words.

It was only as I was regaining my energy at the end of chemotherapy that I realised how far it had taken me down physically. I was buzzing. Blood pulsing through my veins, the energy was like a wave. 

Six months later, it was only when I started regaining my dreams that I realised how far it had taken me down psychologically. I was buzzing. 

Although I fought it, cancer had made me content with life as it was. I had become a nurturer, protective of life. If we're happy, why change? The future was a great unknown, a blank slate. 

The human brain as we know it went through a period of unprecedented growth over the last two million years. While the brain of Homo habilus had spent nearly 500 million years getting to its just-over-half-a-kilogram size, our anatomically modern Homo sapiens brains have near tripled that size. This growth was almost entirely the addition of our frontal lobes. Here's my pretty one (it's a bit dented actually, and a bit empty on one side):

Until fairly recently, writes Dan Gilbert in Stumbling on Happiness, scientists thought the frontal lobe wasn't any good to us, because people whose frontal lobes were damaged seemed to do fine without them. However in the twentieth century, scientists began realising there were actually calming benefits to removing part of the frontal lobe, and thus arose the lobotomy. 

...needless to say, scientists then began to take note of what was being lost. People who had frontal lobe damage or partial removal seemed normal (perhaps happier), functioned normally, and tested pretty normally. However, when given a task that involved planning and conceptualising the future, they tanked. 

"Live in the moment" and its many variations is one of the most common mantras in happiness studies and philosophies. Ironically, James and I had recently decided to study happiness, to find a way to make it fit within capitalism so we could make a living while increasing the world's net happiness. With his support, I had quit my job to work on this.

The Beebs revelation came to full fruition on a weekend road trip to the East Coast. For the first few weeks of my 'new job', we had struggled with me being happy to do the work for our businesses, but easily distracted by what I saw as more pressing tasks for our lives, now. I was frustrated that James wanted me to be more driven, more pumped up about a future I couldn't seem to fully grasp. 

He was the future person, I said, please, take care of that because I'm so sorry, I can't see it. I'm the now person, let me take care of the now things - the next meal, groceries, the dishes, taking care of our plants, exercise, smiling, those things that make our everyday lives more comfortable and joyful. These words, although I had never felt more earnest about anything, also felt like a stranger's words coming out of my mouth. This wasn't me, before. But this is how I feel, now. 

Beebs was a pet name for me James developed post-treatment. Beebs was the me that was a bit aloof, that always had crazy hair (or no hair, or half-hair), that danced in the kitchen in bootie pants and a Swandri, that grinned at the sight of a bee or a cool tree (there are so many!), that blasts Ice Cube while doing dishes with bright yellow rubber gloves. Every meal was the best meal of her life (the more experimental, the better though), she mismatched clothes on a daily basis and beamed at strangers as they walked by, giggling at the sheer joy of being alive. Beebs was how I coped. 

I'm sick of being Beebs, I said one day. Feeling a little sexually frustrated and wanting to be taken seriously, I missed the way James used to look at me. As Bethany. As an intellectual equal, a business partner, a woman. I love Beebs though, James smiled. She's part of you. 

In the late 1960's, Harvard professor Dr Richard Alpert quit his job and took off to India. There, he met a spiritual guru, later returning to the US as 'Baba Ram Dass' to write the popular book Be Here Now. It's well known that to quiet the mind - to live in the now as Eckhart Tolle puts it, or in Osho's words, moment-to-moment - is no mean feat for humans. Our mental chatter can be incessant, tiring, addictive. Yet this "present moment" is also well known to be a path to happiness. 

Now hang on - if we were just all happy, living in the moment all the time, meandering like bumble bees getting drunk off pollen from one flower to the next, then what would the world come to? Why would anyone strive? 


Natural questions, ones that I was relieved to find psychologists and philosophers have already pondered and found certain answers to, so we don't have to. Subjective Wellbeing calls momentary-happiness 'positive affect', and therefore to measure our happiness, we subtract our amount of negative moments from our amount of positive feelings, and add that to how satisfied we are with life-as-a-whole. Martin Seligman, the 'father of positive psychology', initially separated happiness into three "happy lives" - the pleasant life, one filled with happy feelings, the good life, in which we cultivate strengths and virtues, and the meaningful life, in which we use our strengths for the good of others. Many more have developed their own definitions to explain the different types of happiness; Ed Diener, Tony Fernando, Dan Gilbert, Bradburn, Ruut Veenhoven, Bentham, even the United Nations. 

And so, my research into happiness and personal life beautifully, painfully collided. I have been so 'happy', but struggling to see the future has led to tension - with James, yes, but mostly with myself. 

That's why I've decided we've just gotta roll with it. Maybe it's okay to be the person who can be happy in the present moment at the expense of imagining the future, maybe I should be valuing it, even sharing it. To not have it "all planned out". 

You can expect much, much shorter posts from now on. And much lighter. 

Handing you over to her now, all the best!

Bethany