I have been writing professionally since I was 17 years old. This stretch of 2021 is the longest I’ve gone in my adult life without working, and the adjustment has been rocky and humbling.
After my mastectomy in May, I made plans to mark my triumphant return to the keyboard clacking class. “Drains out, brains out!” I was looking forward to telling everyone, thinking that once the last few feet of irksome medical tubing were pulled out of my body, I could more or less be “normal.”
Then came chemotherapy.
Surgery, and the subsequent recovery from it, was a comparative cakewalk. In addition to introducing a menagerie of weird-ass, miserable, and creatively torturous side effects, going through chemo induces a sort of psychological twilight zone.
All I want to do is work, except this massively narcissistic ailment keeps finding new ways to monopolize my attention. Relentless cycles of drenching sweats, chills, and hot flashes lead to sleep deprivation, which leads to several days of babbling madness, blubbering tears, and generalized hopelessness. There are ever-lengthening periods of physical disability, in which trips between the couch, the door, and my bedroom are more like small odysseys (yesterday I broke a sweat walking to my mailbox). Then there are the murder intestines, full-on gastrointestinal dragons that emerge, angry and inflamed, when you ask them to digest the food you need to have any measure of strength without the gut bacteria they need to do it. And then of course, there’s the returning fear and isolation and loneliness and paranoia reminiscent of spring 2020, because I’m already too sick to risk a breakthrough COVID infection, no matter how statistically rare they may be.
On “good days,” when I have precious stretches of mobility and something approaching normalcy, I try to cram and catch up on the living and thinking I’ve missed, but of course, I can’t, and I have to prioritize doing the things that will get me through the next period of hellish helplessness. I can cook for myself and do laundry and keep my apartment tidy and go for walks, but I can’t do that and work, too. There simply are not enough usable hour rations for all of it.
Recently, I likely worked myself into such a pique of guilt and self-loathing for not turning in words I’d pledged during one of said good days that I landed myself in the emergency room. Neck muscle spasms begat a Saturday night ambulance ride and a Dilaudid drip.
Few things make me feel as shitty as not delivering on promises to my editor, so naturally I obsess over it while simultaneously avoiding him. The shame burns hot in my neck. Why won’t my body and my brain just do what I want them to do? It feels like such an enormous personal failure when they don’t, especially when one relies on them to make a living. I feel larcenous and lazy—I’m lucky enough to have a job as a staff critic and decent health insurance and yet for months, all I’ve been able to manage to write are tweets, all the while witnessing a carousel of artwork I’d normally be critiquing drift by. Those works and artists deserve the fully researched and reported essay treatment, not surface-level bullshit, and yet I just do not have the capacity to engage with the level of excellence I feel they require. It fucking sucks, and I’m sorry.
In my more delusional states, I think I should be using this time to write a book or two, and catch up on all the books I need to read, and somehow keep up with all the other unseen mechanisms that are necessary to avoiding the egotistical cliff of critical dilettantism.
Instead, I am, as ever, behind.
I worry about succumbing to a morass of self-pity. Well, I do until I am unable to continue lying to myself that it’s not that bad. It is. It really fucking is, and I just have to get through it.
I know I have endurance. I know I have mettle. In the worst, sweatiest, sorest days of my late 20s triathlon training, I used to tell myself two things to get through workouts: “I have all the gears I need to get where I have to go” and “I have the spirit of Chrissie Wellington within me.”
Now I have to learn a new lesson, and boy, is it a hard one: sometimes it’s okay to pump the brakes. It doesn’t mean you’re stopped forever, even when it feels like you are. Just know that I’m desperately impatient to meet you on the other side.
I know, in a different way, the frustration of wanting your mind and body to work as normal when your body is dealing with recovering from surgery or other medical challenges. I hope you are gentle with yourself as you recover and get through your treatment.
I used to be a composer. I hope to be one again. A heart transplant 2 1/2 years ago, and the brutal drugs required to keep me from rejecting the new heart, have taken something resembling the toll you describe in your wonderful article. Maybe I can compose a little tone poem about my murder meds. Here's to meeting on the other side!