Empathy and defense, cancer survivor superpowers.
Because I didn’t get them as a kid, they became vital to me, growing, and they are vital to me, grown.
I cannot reboot, start again from birth, with better parents, better teachers, a better world.
But it does repair me, restore me, to provide for others the empathy and defense, or feeling and protection, I was denied for so long, and that even now, I sense is in short supply.
I am used to feeling that my skin is bare to the weather, and that my heart is exposed to circumstance’s shocks. I confronted the prospect of my own death at an early age, when my failing existence went unacknowledged by the people who were supposed to love me. It led me to consider how I mattered, and how I could make myself matter, through words and acts and being itself.
In 1987-1988, I was supposed to be enjoying a triumphant year as a high school senior, but the high school was closed because of asbestos contamination. We older teens had a few hours of schooling a day at the middle school, where we were warned not to infect the middle schoolers with our immorality. I floated down the hallway like a butterfly with one wing. No one saw me or knew me. I had missed junior year and half of sophomore year due to my cancer treatment. I was a nonentity.
In the basement room of the middle school that substituted for a gym, I lifted weights to Michael Jackson’s “Man in the Mirror” on the radio, as it played every day at the same time. Barely a year past my bone marrow transplant for Hodgkin lymphoma, I didn’t know how long I had to live. I was determined to be healthy, pumping iron in a windowless concrete cell then walking out the emergency exit to the track around the football field to see what the day was trying to tell me.
I was also determined to be a good person. To be the person my parents were not. As Michael Jackson and his gospel choir sing, “To make that change.” To say the difficult words, to hold the hands of the sick, to witness dying and death, to travel into worlds most would not dare to enter.
Because I had been there myself. I knew the coordinates of despair. I knew the sensations of loneliness. I despised people who were so delicate or so defensive or so dumb that they refused to acknowledge that we are all dancing around the abyss.
I sold daffodils in the hallway to raise money for cancer research. I had a motley assortment of acquaintances I met through the American Cancer Society, individuals I visited to help but who also offered me comfort and affirmation. When the world seemed indifferent to my continued existence, I found a way to make a difference with my differences, by acknowledging and embracing what other people shunned or ignored. We made a tiny community of the forlorn and the neglected. Some died along the way.
That I did not die became the summoning of the trumpet. I continue to do and to dare. If I defy death by cancer, I might as well defy death by a world that at best seems indifferent to me and at worst seems malicious to me. If no one in particular is going to care about me and for me, I am going to do it myself, and while I am at it, why not extend my caring to others who are also, if not lost, then at a loss?
Thus I have made my way. I have forged, not ahead, but alongside, the ghosts, the shadows, the misshapen, the hobbling, the horrid. Peculiarity doesn’t bother me. It is so much more appealing and understandable than relentless sameness, constantly staying on track, on pace, and within the lines.
Color and expression are only great when they are not bound. When they exceed the page, the desk, the room, the ground.
Boundless as love. Powerful as energy.
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