I don’t want to do it wrong.
Martin Luther King’s “Street Sweeper” speech. I listen often and cry in hopeful ambition each time.
Once we got back into the car at Whole Foods, minutes after hearing the grim truth of my diagnosis I was struck with an all-consuming desire to make use of this time, whatever I had left of it. This wasn’t a pull to bucket lists as they’d been sold to me, to finally taking that trip to Ireland or Thailand, to seeing another Broadway show, returning to my hometown in Iowa, or having just one more bag of Juanita’s chips with all the dips of my dreams (never not guacamole).
The feeling also wasn’t one of a familiar type-A drive to BE! DO! LIVE! Instead a new flavor of fear, or maybe something resembling it - I just didn’t want to do this wrong. To wallow in the past, drugging up all the choices that I made that caused this cancer. Why didn’t I get sober earlier? Why did I allow diet culture to jerk me around by an obsession with changing my body? What nooks and crannies of my life have I wasted? Have I made any damn difference at all? Have I been living MY life or some mingle-mangle of expectations of what a woman, a business owner, a good partner and daughter and ally and friend and citizen of the world should be? The future was filled with insurmountable, unanswerable questions. I’m not at all concerned with legacy, I’m not afraid of a Bad Place. I recognize my small mighty residence in this large, expanding universe. What haunted me is I’m JUST starting to figure out who I am, what I like, to ask the only questions that matter to myself each day, “what do you need, my love? What will bring you joy? Peace? What are you feeling called to do?” I’d only just woken up to the idea that it’s not my job to transform the world for others—it is my job to transform it for me. I’d just begun to inhabit the practical experience of this and now, I was entering a mystery.
My partner, Evan, has always been the humble, wise sage of our family. He was the one who, when I was in a shit job where I would cry on Sunday nights before work the next day would gently remind me that ‘Hayley, nothing you do matters and you’re going to die someday.’ Now, I hear how that can sound, well, dark to some but for me it is refreshing. It was the Stoics who introduced me to Memento Mori, the reflection on mortality as a tool for living. It was Abraham Hicks in The Law of Attraction who taught me “I can’t get it wrong. I can’t get it done.”
Awww, words. Yes! Books, writing, sharing. Words. This will save me.
Back from Eugene, I dropped my bags and got on my hands and knees, pulling all the books off the shelves I knew would hold the key to not just surviving this but living through this.
Chogyam Trungpa’s Sacred Path of the Warrior
Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning
Audre Lorde’s prose on her battle with lung cancer
The poetry of Mary Oliver, Rumi, and Rapi Kaur
I scoured the internet for books on living with and through cancer, stumbling across what has become my true north of female wisdom on the subject from Suleika Jaouad and Kate Bowler with pragmatic wisdom from Kris Karr. I built a nest for reading, stacked up the knowledge, and began.
The perfect balance of comedy, poetry, and true-crime.
Next, there was the matter of sharing with those I loved, with social media, with strangers the truth as I was moving through it. It was never a question if I would or would not share. The recovering Catholic in me had a few internal squabbles about preserving my humility, not wanting to make it about me, and, boy oh boy, am I still total garbage at accepting gifts and compliments without immediately raining down gifts and complements on others in some autocratic quest to make love a zero-sum game. It’s not. Pro-tip: anyone who makes you feel like love is a quid-pro-quo is not, what my mom so awesomely refers to as an “it getter” - so you best getter your ass out of that relationship.
Choosing to share a diagnosis, or any personal news, is an intimate, personal choice and there is no right or wrong way to do it. I, Hayley, hold the core belief system that I’m meant for great love. I love and trust people enough to tell them the truth. I also believe that energy has mystical powers to do just about anything, so the more ‘light and love’, the more prayers, the more shaman visualizations, the more witches dancing naked in the moonlight on my behalf the better chance I have to survive this.
I have an Epictetus-adjacent quote that I read every morning that reads:
“You accept with complete honesty the perils of the obstacle in front of you. You remain convinced that if it is possible to survive, not only will you, but you will also turn this into the best thing that ever happened to you.”
I’m not ready to say that cancer has saved my life, but I’m close. I’m coming alive to the simple beauty of what matters in a moment. There is no fear of missing out, which is what I expected if ever facing death. And YET, an undercurrent of uneasiness still finds me in the day, that same thought from the painful moments after getting the diagnosis, that I don’t want to do this wrong. Maybe this too is a gift, a reminder to remember who I am, to welcome this and this and this as it is. To transform the world for me.
When I/we travel there is a basic cadence of exploration to get the local feel: coffee shops, grocery stores, bakeries, and bookstores. Pictured here in my happiest of those places. (The Last Bookstore in downtown LA)