Identity and learning

(I wrote this a couple of weeks ago - sorry I only am just getting around to posting it!)

  ...

I think I’m having an identity crisis.

Alton, a wonderful mentor and professor at the University of Idaho, asked me before we left Moscow what my main lesson had been over the three years. I told him with sureness, “I have learned to love.”

Despite love being something I’ve since found that you can’t “know” once and for all and you can never fully learn it, it’s probably a fair statement considering the anti-love, anti-commitment girl that started at the university in January 2010.

I took a big exam this a while ago. I didn’t do very well. In fact, I left before anyone else, leaving multiple blank answers. It was something I thought I was “good at” – general knowledge, writing, basic grammar and numeracy, and last but not least, exams. I thought that stuff came naturally.

I thought journalism stuff comes naturally, that’s one of the main reasons I’m doing it.

In Idaho I studied Anthropology and International Studies. Of course, despite all that training, I didn’t come away telling Alton, “I learned to be an anthropologist.” No, I learned about love.

What on earth am I learning about now? I wonder, as I lie on our bed with a headache and barely energy to type.

Perhaps it is to learn. That’s what I’ve been wondering today anyway.  “Learning to learn” was the catch-phrase when I went to school. I should have taken that more seriously.

Now, faced with my own inadequacies, I see that I can’t, and don’t want to, just float on by doing things last minute and still getting “good grades” (quotation marks implying I don’t know what the worth of those really were in the end). I want to, and need to, truly learn things. Repeat. Visualise. Discuss. Articulate. Question. Repeat.

Or perhaps it is to say sorry. That’s something I’ve always struggled with, that humility thing. I may say it was the cancer that has “brought me to my knees,” but don’t believe it.

The cancer was only a trigger. It was a situation I found myself in that required me to rely on others, and that made me act out of character and have to apologise for it. I didn’t want it to be an excuse, ever.

I guess time will tell what I’m learning from this stage of life. I hope, and am sure; it’s not just journalism. 

Smooth towels

The old crackly ones were always my favourites. The way they would tickle my body, removing any remaining cells that didn’t belong. It was the best form of exfoliation – so much better than all those products with little exfoliating bits in them and fake scents that they charged way too much for. All you need is a nice, old crusty towel.

Those newer towels were always last left in our clean towel pile. They just didn’t feel good; they didn’t itch itches or exfoliate skin in a delightful way. And to make matters worse, they always felt wet straight away. Gross.

Then, there are some towels that are rough on one side, smooth on the other.

I used the smooth side today, and even those annoyingly-wet-feeling smooth fibres seemed to grate and cut my skin, making me scrunch my eyes a little and once again, silently swallow the pain.

That’s what the chemo has done lately. It’s made me make drastic life changes like changing to soft towels. It’s made sitting on the toilet become something that makes me gasp, despite needing to do it more often. My arms shake as I lever myself out of bed in the morning.

And the other day, it won. I was beat, as I woke after a sleepless night covered in itchy red rashes. I finally gave in and took a day off class. The nurse had no idea why, but wasn’t surprised. Nothing is surprising with chemotherapy. It does as it pleases.

The rashes have gone away now, but I now understand what creates the air of sympathy and pity that surrounds chemo.

Chemotherapy will soon be viewed as archaic, and people will no longer have to go through it. Doctors will remorsefully admit they administered it, and people like me will be regarded as some of chemotherapy’s last victims.

I have always been a dreamer, and tended to change my life plan every few months and be passionately pursuing it until the new idea. Perhaps I need to dream again, to make a plan. But to be honest, even to remain a functioning member of society takes effort and so I just have to focus on getting through this, day by day, moment by moment.

And I just have to suck it up use the smooth towels, for now. 

"Side Effects"

Keyboard letters came so easily to me when I typed. Typing is a sign of the worlds privileged in itself, I suppose. It just come so naturally to ...us. 

I remember sitting on our ragged couch in Togo with Ro’s cousin showing him the magical way a key pressed on one surface will make a little black letter appear on another surface.

Reminded of this now as I type, I realize that I took this ability for granted, my fingers searching for the letters they don’t always find.

The chemo has been going well. I am bright most days. I am doing well at my course, keeping ahead. 

I am also currently hunched over my laptop in pain, typing slowly with slow fingers that spend their days tingling, and about to go to bed at 8.15pm, exhausted.

I’m humbled that you would read my little black dots on a screen.

Good night,

B

The City that Cried Wolf

"Just a Sharpie and a glass: Kiwi ingenuity leads to easy quake measurer"

The house we are staying in overlooks Wellington. It’s beautiful. The Tararua mountain range in the distance, the Orongorongas stretching down the other side of a harbour on which weak, dappled sunlight wavers. It all seems quite…developed. Affluent. Peaceful.

Yet, “20 seconds of horror” screams the headline. The first seven pages of today’s newspaper are all about the quakes that have shaken the area over the weekend.

Emails with solemn tones have been circulated between journalism students. The expectation is to rush in to the un-earthquake secure building at dinnertime on a Sunday night and excitedly find people who had to rush to shelter, whose bookshelves lost their books or whose vase broke.

It’s not that I don’t care about the earthquakes, or the people who have to pick up bottles or books or even the one person who was injured by their TV coming loose off the wall.

It’s just that, well, I worry.

I worry about the fact that my friends in the US and around the world are being told that an “earthquake more powerful than 100 atomic bombs and the Christchurch quakes of 2011” has hit Wellington. For, on first glance of these articles, they are completely justified in feeling worried that we are in a dire situation.

Beyond that, I worry about what Wellington would do if a really devastating earthquake hit, whether the world would think nothing of it as we think nothing of natural disasters in other small nations. It’s not their fault for not being concerned - they’ve just heard it all before.

So let’s take a new approach.

New Zealand sits right on the fault line where the Pacific plate has been jammed under the Indo-Australian plate. In fact, that subduction line that circles the Pacific and creates the ring of fire is right behind our house.

“Wellington Earthquake free for eight months”

The media reaction to something so natural to the earth as an earthquake serves as an illustration of how humans have unquestioningly come to believe we rule the natural world. Unfortunately, monotheistic religion can take a lot of the blame for that, in propagating ideas of the earth being ours to reap and condemning other belief systems that consider humans at one with nature.

“Kiwis reminded of the incredible power of nature”

For how dare the earth, which formed by these processes over billions of years for us to live on and enjoy now, shake the house we have built with cut down trees or paid for with a concept of money we have created?

“Amazing subduction process going on right under our feet”

Despite my hesitancy at going into a field that expects me to instill fear in people in one of the safest countries in the world for the sake of selling papers, hits or page counts, I do love journalism. I love telling important stories about important issues, I love inspiring people, entertaining and educating them, and believe this is what the media should be about.

That’s why I believe people deserve more than simply fear instilling, sensational reporting. That’s why people deserve to hear more about the plates and the incredible forces of nature than someone falling off their seat in a movie theatre. There is a place for discussing emergency plans, which has been done, but why not find out who has opposed earthquake strengthening and see what they think now?

Yes, I know, because we are writing to that mythical eleven-year-old who reads the news every day but wants his or her entertainment.

How about -

“Hey John, Wellington ROCKS!”*

*Earlier this year Prime Minister John Key referenced Wellington as being a “dying city”. Needless to say, people in the capital weren’t happy about that. Cheers Guy for saying this!

Walking up the hill

Did I tell you how liberating it was when I stopped in my tracks and realized last week I was perfectly okay to pause and catch my breath halfway up a hill?

I suppose I had thought that because I was choosing to carry on as normal, my body should be able to perform as normal.

"How on earth does a poison physiologically make it more difficult to walk up a hill?" I asked in frustration.

Ready to launch an enquiry on the World Wide Web, I was gently reminded it was simply that my blood has less oxygen to carry around, hence, less energy. The chemo wasn’t, as I had momentarily imagined, eating away at my muscles.

***

Yesterday when I was walking home, a group of young adults about my age powered past me on the eight-sets-of-steps hill between downtown and the road above. They were all carrying bulging grocery bags.

A debate began in my mind – another chapter in the ceaseless battle between self-pity and acceptance. It just felt so blatantly in my face this time, watching their behinds bound up the steps in front like.

It was the girl lagging behind that helped win the battle for acceptance. 

Glancing back, I saw her with a nonchalant smile on her face, taking her time, and unhurried by the fact that her friends were up ahead. I smiled at her and said, “they’ve gone and left you behind, huh?”

She didn’t seem to mind.

The thought, “she doesn’t have any excuses like I do” didn’t last long as I realized just how ludicrous it was. Why should she need one? Why do we need excuses? Why do I need to explain myself taking my time walking up a hill?

You could say chemo is an uphill battle and some would try to differ – yes, I know it gets worse and worse. But with every challenge it presents I learn something about myself I wouldn’t have learnt otherwise, and that’s what I call an uphill battle.

Bruises and Brains

You may have seen recently that I've been toying with the idea of changing course in this blog and heading more into research. This, by my journalism instructors definition, is a "rant-style" blog, and is too personal for a journo.

Early last week, James was tickle-attacking me (I call it attack because he isn't ticklish and I am rendered defenseless) and my fingernail brushed my thigh.

It was a light brush, but something in my squealing tone must have changed as I was taken aback by unexpected pain. Tingles shot up into my groin and down to my knee, and a few minutes later tiny, black bruises had splotched themselves on my white, winter skin.

It was all revealed a few days later when I was sitting in the reclining leather chair in the day ward for my chemotherapy, chatting with the nurses and the old man opposite me on his IV line.

"Have you noticed any strange bruising, Bethany?" a concerned nurse asked. I laughed. My platelets are at a record low: 34. The average range is 150 - 450.

Staring down at my now-enlarged bruise the other day, I realized I can't simply research. If I did, the little stupid personal things would be lost, as would my space to express word in whichever way they want to paint themselves on the page.

And so, I made a new site specifically for researching brain cancer. I'm focusing on compiling new innovations, approaches and understandings about tumors of the brain. If you're not of the mind to be bogged down by cancer and all it entails, I've formatted it to make it easy to do a quick scan of the important bits and then take off running!

If you're interested, do check it out: www.brainbuzz.org.