how cancer camp made me a better artist

I have been a participant and a volunteer staff for cancer camp, and the experiences all have led to tangible personal growth for me. Much of that growth has been related to my self-confidence and the way I interact with others, but along with that has been my growth as an artist. Camp Koru offers an art table, where supplies are made available for open-ended artistic endeavors. It was at that art table I ended a four-year stretch of keeping my lifelong love of art at arm's length and started painting again. Last fall, I opted out of a traditional career path in order to pursue my love of making art. The following are some of the things I learned from my time so far with Athletes for Cancer that have made my art more daring, more engaging, and more satisfying to make:

The soul speaks many languages, many have no words at all. It's hard enough for most of us to fully express ourselves with words alone. When you add chemo brain to the mix, there are times it feels nearly impossible to talk about how we feel, what we have been through, what we hope for. Thankfully, there is a plethora of other ways to get it all out. Music, adventure sports, creative high fives, theatre, photography, pantomime,  dance, painting, sand sculptures, and on and on and on. When you put your soul into something, you find you are speaking clearly without having to speak at all.

Open up and be vulnerable. Let them see your scars. Port scars, shingles scars, surgical scars, all the places your spirit tore and was stitched back together or left to heal on its own over time. Announce when you are scared, when you are frustrated, when you are filled with joy. Push past all your hang-ups, all the boxes you live in, all the ways you guard yourself. Put your story on the table. Tell the gross stories, the strange stories, the bodily function stories, the loss stories, the giddy pleasure stories, the gallows humor stories. Let go of what other people think about your stories. Someone outside your inner circle may need to hear what you have to say.Offer something of yourself to others so you can make room for their stories.

Close your mouth and open your ears and eyes. You have lived and you have a lot to share, but the same is true of the world around you. Turn off your inner monologue, set your own stories aside, and pay attention to the stories being told. Connect with friends, strangers, the pulse of the city, the rhythm of the ocean, the opera of a storm, the whispers of the trees. Really hear what's being said. Take it in. Ask questions. Turn a conversation into a an interview for "Most Interesting Person in the World Magazine," with the other party being your cover story. The things you will learn and the connections you will make will be significant.

Embrace silence, quiet, and pregnant pauses. Prolonged silence can channel new pathways of creative thought; quiet can lead to clarity; pregnant pauses and awkward silence can say so much more than the words not being spoken. All are important to human connection and artistic endeavors, but our own anxieties, eagerness, or misunderstandings about communication can cause us to undervalue such moments. Likewise, the "empty" areas in a piece have as much to say as the places one fills with detail or line or color.

Take breaks. Stretch. Eat a snack, hydrate, and reapply. It's amazing to paddle out and catch waves over and over and over, and it can be wonderful to sit at the drawing table for nine hours at a time, but you need to be nice to your body or you will get hurt. No matter what you are doing, you will do it better if you stop every once in a while to stretch well, refuel with something healthy, drink lots of water, and put on more sunscreen. Okay, maybe sunscreen isn't necessary for painting indoors, but it doesn't hurt to use a stretch break to also sweep eraser crumbs off the desk, walk the dog, or wash the dishes. You will come back to it reinvigorated and ready for more.

Challenge yourself. Push through discomfort. Standing up on that first wave, pushing past the crux on a climb, talking about things you are used to choking down; all of these take strength of will and a little faith in yourself and those around you to get to the next level. Similarly, sticking to what I am already comfortable with artistically tends to yield unsatisfying results. Taking on the challenge of improving my technique or learning a new discipline may be more difficult, but the reward of finally getting the hang of something new is a rush of small victory endorphins and another set of vocabulary with which to communicate. It's okay to suck. You probably won't stand up on your first wave, but you can't get to headstands and tandem rides without trying until you nail it. Every painting won't be a masterpiece...in fact, maybe none of them will be. It doesn't matter. What matters is the trying, the little victories, the culmination of hard work and patience that leads to a breakthrough.

Art heals. Enough said.

left it all at the top

My body is on a weird sleep schedule lately. The Ambien they put me on in Seattle has been perfect for the last six months or so when I wanted eight solid hours of sleep. The last few days have found me awake at 4:30 in the morning to use the bathroom, though. Then, of course, I am wide awake despite attempts to bury my face in my pillows and get my body in exactly the position it was in when I was asleep. If I know anything about me, I know this is a good time to write in this-here blog and free up some brain space.

New birthday is July 19th, so I have my long-term follow-up visit at SCCA scheduled for the week before then. I am actually excited to go to Seattle. July is a nice time to be there, and tests to see where I am on the righteous path of bodily healing are the same as the tests to determine my fitness for a bone marrow transplant, but the psychology is different. Everything about this year is different. I'm taking steps and leaps in the direction of my optimum health instead of bracing against the onslaught of surgery after surgery and the inevitable transplant. That is all behind me and I keep shedding the hang-ups of that experience like layers of clothes on a sprint to skinny-dip.

Angel's Rest was a good place for me to leave a lot of that behind. A few dear friends and I hiked the 5-mile up-and-back in the Columbia Gorge last Saturday. The hike is 2.5 miles up with a 1,500' elevation increase along the side of the Gorge that switchbacks through deep green forest and along exposed boulder falls. Every turn of direction opens a view of the Columbia River or Cooper Falls, and this time of year sprinkles much of the lower part of the trail with trillium blooms in white, pink, and purple. I have done this hike quite a few times, and I usually ascend without stopping until the half-way point amid one of the rock falls. We must have stopped three or four times on the way to the summit, which was mildly frustrating for me as a reminder that I am not yet where I want to be in my physical fitness; my friends are gracious and kind and helped me see that being up there was a major accomplishment in of itself. All the way up, I pushed myself to climb a little further than my comfort zone. It's always been my way, at least as an adult. I was a timid kid but as an adult I have found the only way to get what I want is to shrug past that initial discomfort to see what the limit really is. The more life I have, the less interested I am in coddling the little voice inside me that wants me to stay within the confines of what is easy and comfortable.

The last few years of surgeries and my transplant have forged that in me deeper: taking on more pain than I wanted so I could be stronger than a potential painkiller addiction; letting go of long-held, unhealthy, imbalanced relationships so I could increase my exposure to my own good nature and appreciation of the caring, brilliant people in my life; walking miles' worth of laps around the BMT ward to keep my muscles from atrophying; taking ballet to rebuild the muscles prednisone wasted by 25 percent; wading back into my hobbies a little at a time, even when my cognitive skills were impaired, because I was depressed without them. The pushing past where I was to get to where I am trying to go has led to a lot of growth, but it's also saddled me with some empty- and half-full baggage to drag around with me. It made the climb up harder, but I left a lot of it at the summit. I left the "Cancer Patient" identity on the bench at the top of Angel's Rest because despite my bi-weekly oncology check-ups, I'm not much of a patient anymore. Sure, I am on a few medications, but I am not the sickly thing I was before my marrow went into remission and my new immune system started destroying the HPV. I left "needing a caregiver" on the bench because I have taken every step to being an autonomous adult again and have the strength and faculties to take care of my own life again. I found an apartment and a roommate, I take Amtrak and Trimet with only a little bit of germ-related hyper-vigilance. I can cook again, read without getting tired after three pages, take crazy long walks for no reason again, knit complicated patterns, maintain a conversation. The last bit is actually still a little hard but not because my brain is healing from being poisoned; I haven't had much in the way of conversation for a while, and less in experiencing life outside my bedroom or a hospital or cancer clinic. It's a practice thing. I also have a hard time talking to attractive people, which is new for me and something I left most of on that bench. I have felt "undatable" for a while, even though that worry has been fairly irrelevant most of this time. I went through a needlessly dramatic break-up, gained a little belly pooch from the prednisone and all the sitting, part of my vulva was removed, and I've been largely mystified at how I am going to get back to being a contributing citizen of my community. The drama of the break-up is over, I exercise five days a week, I'm going back to school, and I know how to make the new landscape of my bikini area work for me. I left "undatable" on the bench. I won't take the leap from "datable" to "dating" until I am settled back in Portland completely ...and even then being able to feel things about people in that way is a new development in healing and will have to be reciprocal and not some surprising crush feelings that turn me into a big idiot dummy when I try to converse with the object of my interest. Nonetheless, I felt my mojo coming back on my way back down Angel's Rest.

The hike down was light and springy. My friends and I chatted happily and I felt all these hang-ups that have been waiting to molt flutter off my back. This time last year, I was in Seattle for my initial testing. I spent a week there before they decided I needed a right-side radical vulvectomy and sentinel node biopsy before I could have my transplant, in case vulvar cancer had metastasized. This time last year, I was a ball of anxiety over the unknown and the imminent, clouded by pain medicines and constantly worried about the balance between my health and my partner's declining ability to deal with everything happening. It was not a good place. Now I am getting back to my old life, a new life, a life with strength and hope and excitement about what is ahead. I am proud of how far I have come in this little bit of time, and thankful for everyone and everything that have contributed to my being here and being unstoppable.


This, like so many other blog posts I put up, is mostly a stream-of-late-night consciousness, so I am not going to bother editing it. I think one day I will actually go over all this brain dump and feels-baring and edit it with my personal journals (on paper!) and make a book out of this experience. I don't feel a distinct theme or thread when I look at it all now, save for my constant need to find homes for the ideas and thought fragments and images that crowd my brain. We'll see. I'd really like to make this into something real and whole.