You are what you tell yourself and I am a garden.

I’m writing today for the first time in a few months. I had a freak out, but it was overdue. My freak outs are basically just a moment of honesty at the wrong time or volume.

Cancer demands I both be an individual and also depend on others more than ever. It’s a very difficult balance to ask for what you need when you’re so used to predicting what others need and no one else is accustomed to the job and the oodles of minutia that I obsess over to complete it “my way.”

I have a weary kid trying to thrive while we are in survival mode. I have a husband learning new ways to love me while holding us together to the best of his ability. Instead of me riding on energy’s coattails, my inability to push forward sometimes feels deeply oppressive, time-consuming, and labor intensive.

Therapy is wonderful, but so much can occur in one hour let alone from week to week.

I’m surrounding myself with positive voices, shows, music, and people. The few people that are here, anyway. Some days it feels like if the mail didn’t exist; I’d be an afterthought.

Some days it feels like I’m Kevin McCallister and I’m in a house made of cancer. Sometimes, I realize my feelings are lying to me and my worth is not in my worst moments in life.

Anyway, freak out is over. I’m get so easily overwhelmed and one student loan issue made me snap. My kiddo and I went outside in the cold to reset my brain.

Going outside and physically leaving the house automatically does it for me. It has to be outside. Cold, hot, rainy … the outside is where I’m happiest. (My new cold issue is why that stinks so badly. That’s 1/2 my year in pain just from the temperature.)

She and I thought of a way to mentally reframe chemotherapy and what it’s doing for me. It’s using visual imagery.

I’m imagining my white blood cells are beautiful plumeria. I’m imagining my red blood cells are a bird pollinating. I’m imagining that I am a garden.

Surgery is the shovel.
Chemo is the pesticide.
Radiation levels everything left.

If I’m a garden, this process is ugly and dangerous sometimes. Gardening doesn’t look good until it’s over. All of this is temporary.

I can fester over my root rot or I can try to water the plumeria and leave bird seed out for that red bird I need to pay attention to me. I can resent what was or try to grow what will be.

Imagining that I am a garden gives me a more peaceful place to tackle my cancer. Instead of grief over treatment and all the side effects and loss that go with it; mentally, I can tend to the garden and remember that it all will make sense when it’s over.

I am a garden.