This afternoon I will attend my youngest child’s Field Day. It will be a steamy 93 degrees here and I will join parents as we stand around and chat while we clap for our children and hug their sweaty bodies and remind them to drink lots of water.
It is always in these group events that so many of us feel like outsiders. It is often when surrounded by many people we are most aware of being alone. For me, this has never been more true than during the past 8 months since my diagnosis with stage IV breast cancer.
I return again and again to the desire to escape, the need to flee, the pull toward being somewhere else. The refrain in the new song I am co-writing with Doug Allen is about this need we all have, regardless of the cause, to take moments during the day where we just “check out” for a bit. It says:
I take a trip inside my head,
I don’t know where I go.
Somewhere else,
Anywhere else,
Far from things I know.
There are days when I want to be the ostrich, when I just am so overwhelmed with things that I can’t be on social media, returning emails, or even talking. I just am still. I notice that I rarely read anymore, even television can’t capture my attention. I sit in silence a lot, and when I have the opportunity I write or work on the songs.
I take those trips inside my head.
The pull of educating and informing is too strong to allow me to stay hidden away, though. Social gravity pulls me back. Sharing and documenting fuel me. I take my anger, my sadness, and my grief and I send them out into the world in constructive words and deeds. I can feel powerless and without control in many ways about what is happening to me but I always feel that I can control my reaction to these things. This is my lesson to the people in my life.
There is a scene in the film Children of a Lesser God where William Hurt’s character jumps into a pool to try to experience utter silence the way that his deaf girlfriend does. He wants to know what that feels like. He quickly realizes, however, that this won’t work. He knows when he rises to the surface he will once again hear sound. He can’t live what she lives. He can’t share her loss in that way.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery wrote, “It is such a secret place, the land of tears.” Most mornings I stand in the shower for a while longer than I need to. I listen to the water, I think about the day, I am grateful to have another. I know I will have more days. For those few minutes I take a trip inside my head. I gather my strength, I focus on the work to be done.
I turn off the water, I step out of the enclosure, and I rejoin the world of the living. That’s what I am doing every day: living with metastatic cancer.
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