Hello friend!
Thank you so much for joining me on these first new steps. I’m going to try to keep this set up short. As I’ve been dealing with a recent brain tumor removal and subsequent radiation/chemo treatments, I was encouraged by my speech therapist to write. She said that it utilizes different parts of the brain than the recently traumatized speech center. Lightening and spreading out the load between the conceptual and mechanical aspects of writing, I found huge relief in being able to process and communicate the things I was feeling and experiences I was having.
That encouragement, paired with my wife and friend’s suggestions that I had a unique opportunity to record this moment in my life pushed me to lean into documenting the observations, conversations, and general experiences of this journey. Things continued to line up and I was invited to join a POC writer’s group here in Nashville and humbly shared my first piece of writing that wasn’t journaling or instructions for filming something.
Like I said, I’m taking some clumsy first steps into something that I’ve found a lot of excitement and creative fulfillment in lately. Each month, I’ll send a new piece that I’ve been working on along with a short list of a few things that’ve interested, amused, or inspired me along the way.
I’m incredibly grateful to share new things, old things, this thing, and that thing with you. This month I’ll start with the piece I first shared with my writer’s group, prompted by the new year. I know it’s a little late, but it’s a good place to start.
When I was younger (and sometimes still,) I secretly loved the part of getting in trouble where, after the ugly bit of actually being punished, I could reemerge unencumbered, absolved and ready to begin anew. Having paid my debt to society, the whole world of potential was ahead of me waiting for me to join it. I carried that rhythm into my adulthood, especially in friendships and jobs, preferring to sever things at the infection’s source and start fresh somewhere or with someone else.
For me, each January is a chance to reset and start over, but not this year.
Back in September, I sat down at my desk only to mysteriously wake up on the floor a few minutes later. After a lot of confusion, throwing up, and a long wait in the ER, a doctor with the best skin I’ve ever seen told me that I have a brain tumor, that it is cancerous, and that they’ll need to operate on it as soon as possible. Since that moment, everything has been a blur of events and information, all coming at different speeds, some like a train and some so slow and unceremonious that my wife and I frequently have to remind ourselves that it all actually happened as we fight to accept the gravity of our new reality.
Here in January we’ve had a record three(!) snowfalls already here in Nashville. The beauty of it falling is only matched by it’s resting, clean and untouched, a new landscape over the old. Eventually we have to go out and the pristine scene is marred by our footsteps revealing the paths we’ve taken while uncovering the car or waiting for the dog to use the bathroom. This view lingers much longer than the unmarked one until it eventually mixes in with the muddy ground below it.
From this borderland between last year and this new one, I found no opportunity to jettison the previous year’s mess and resaddle with only the light load of potential. I still take handfuls of pills every day, I still can’t drive myself, and my hair didn’t magically grow back as January 1st came and went like a ghost. The clock struck midnight and we were stuck at home, unable to celebrate because of a potential covid exposure in the friend group, another resilient tumor from a previous year.
It’s like the new snow fell, but the boot prints were already there, unable to be covered up and hidden by the romance of a fresh start. I can’t manifest a total reset this time. The scars will stick around. The effects of last year’s surgery and radiation are still here as I start this year’s chemotherapy. Last year’s unearthed fragility will forever affect my ability to start clean with each passing year. Instead I will have immovable monuments that reminding me of where I have been and guiding me forward.
- I’ve thought about this piece about continued travel restrictions during covid by my new friend Yurina Yoshikawa at least 2-3 times a week since reading it last month
- It took me days to figure out how to locally add files to spotify, but I am glad to be able to listen to this song every morning.
- Always a sucker for a miniseries, this 4 episode show called “Landscapers” is one of the most creative things I’ve seen in a while (think if Michel Gondry directed a “true” crime series.)
- this animation and any/all artwork by, writing from, or conversation with the drastically talented Meera Lee Patel brings me so much beauty and hope.
- I would be absolutely remiss to not include Wordle, we’ll see how available it stays after it goes through the NYT pipeline, but if you can’t get enough, here’s a great archive of them to work your way through.
See you next month,
-Joe