My Magical Writing Weekend
Imagine "magical" as a glitter text gif
I’ll admit it—I imagined my long weekend in the writer’s cabin in the woods as a picturesque movie sequence. A few profound and pivotal days in the life of a burgeoning writer, a scene that would really play well as a biopic montage one day (after I’ve published many gorgeous and successful novels, of course).
In the film (film, not movie), my chemo curls would look less like Inspector Gadget and more like the glamorous ruffled French bob that I showed my wonderful hair stylist. I would wear a big vintage fair isle sweater (which I don’t even own in real life because I’m allergic to wool) and, oh, I don’t know, let’s say cashmere blend sweatpants. Since we’re styling a movie that doesn’t exist. Sorry, film. She is effortlessly beautiful, chic, expensive. It’s clear that our heroine is not even really trying—she simply can’t help being so magnetic! She’s got rizz, as the kids say.
At this point, I’m supposed to follow that description with a dramatic contrast and say that actually, I looked sloppy and unkempt, an absolute mess really, but in real life: I looked fine. My pants were of the moderately expensive wide legged yoga variety and I wore a basic long sleeve tee from Uniqlo. Crucially, I have reached the stage of post-treatment life where I look no different from anybody else. I dreamed of this kind of normalcy when I had a steroid moon face and no eyelashes.
In the movie version of my weekend, the one that I dreamed of but I swear I tried so hard not to, I either wrote many thousands of words of my novel-in-progress or I went fully red string mode and mapped out everything—every scene, every character, everything. Either way, in this version I’d return to Portland feeling accomplished and proud and reborn. Maybe I’d feel at peace and brim over with tears of love at the morning birdsong!
Instead, though, I felt…uneasy. It was that dreaded feeling of wherever I go, there I am. As always. One constant in my life is that I can’t help but firmly believe that a change of scenery will fix me. In my defense: it does, usually! OK, maybe just a little, for a little while. It’s a hard-fought lesson I’ve been grappling with my entire adult life, over and over and over again. Do you experience that? Do you always just want to run?
Getting what could have been a death sentence at 37 didn’t do much to ease this perpetual yearning to leave—to put on my shoes and fix it all by dumping myself someplace new. All gritted teeth and an iron grip.
Alas, I did not surround myself with manuscript pages, feverishly writing in margins and reordering scenes. Here’s what I actually did that first full day, in no particular order: I took a 45 minute walk that left me absolutely winded. I made three proper meals and washed the dishes each time. I showered. I made a truly abysmal, too strong coffee. I journaled out on the patio. I read a bit of The Odyssey. I nearly fell asleep on two separate occasions on the reclining seat in the corner of the cabin. I listened to the entire discography of Widowspeak. I attempted (poorly) to light a fire in the wood burning stove. I did not keep a fire alive despite my valiant efforts (does this say something about me as a human, I wondered with some dismay). In fact, the only writing I did all day (aside from journaling) was a single page about my failure at building a fire and how my ancestors would scoff at me. I also went on Twitter (bad Lena! bad!) and Instagram and watched an episode of a silly docuseries on Netflix about the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II. (Actually it’s kind of engaging, I shouldn’t be a total hater about it.)
I gave up on Making Art that day and crawled into bed with my laptop streaming the Ottoman show for an hour or two. Then, just as I was getting ready to turn it off and go to sleep: the power went out. The power went out! Under the darkness of a Pisces New Moon, I thought! Can the stars be any more literal, I wondered?? Despite my deep desire to Read Into It Astrologically, I decided to set aside the stars because I had to deal with the material circumstances at hand. There was barely any service in the cabin so I sent Josh a text letting him know what happened, just in case. I put my phone on low battery mode and walked through the little cabin with a battery-operated pillar candle, closing and locking windows to trap the warm air. I looked for a flashlight just in case (there was none, tsk tsk.)
As I closed a kitchen window, I had a fleeting thought of sleeping with a kitchen knife and immediately chided myself for being so damn silly. I don’t know where the thought came from! I don’t even fuck with true crime! It’s ambient nonsense in the atmosphere and it wormed itself into my brain. I left the knife in the drawer. I thought about calling the owner/host of this cabin but it was after 11 pm and really, what was he going to do about a damn wind storm?
I piled an extra throw blanket over me that I brought from home and curled up under the covers. I had no internet so I was left with whatever music I had downloaded to my laptop, most of which is not appropriate for falling asleep. I have an old S. Carey album, though, so I dimmed the screen and left it playing on the little dining table. I looked out the window at trees swaying ominously in darkness and couldn’t believe this was happening to me. What if the power didn’t come back and I had to find someplace else to stay tomorrow? What if I froze to death??
And then there I was: curled up in bed, in absolute darkness. I was alone with myself and feeling tired and overfed and a little dejected about not having written during my first day at this “magical” writer’s cabin (according to many scribblings in the guestbook, which I had read during breakfast). Worst of all, I had nothing to distract me. I have a book light that clips to your book so I could have read but my feelings were simply too loud. I found, with some surprise, that my spirit was frantic, like a clipped pigeon held in a shoebox. I realized then that I have been avoiding it all, increasingly filling the moments in my life with a surplus of stimuli until no real moments of peace found their way in.
During treatment, I of course fantasized about what my life could be like when I was “on the other side.” I named goals in between bloody noses, achy neighborhood walks, heavy naps, and post-surgery drain-emptying. But the urgent necessity of keeping yourself alive when your body is trying to die requires a different kind of thinking. You have no choice but to be present. If you aren’t paying attention, how else can you ask the nurse, when she calls, about how to deal with your chemo side effects? The only future-oriented thinking I could allow was what it might feel like to be free of minutia of pain. One day I’ll be able to walk two miles. Eating salt won’t make my mouth explode in sores someday. Medical menopause will end and then I’ll sleep through the night again!
Every cancer patient hears at one point or another that post-treatment life is the real challenge. I can’t help but imagine, based on my own experience, that we all also think some version of “…but I’m built different.”
Of course, to know it objectively and to plan for it is simply no match for the experience of it. After brutalizing cancer treatment, you can’t know what you’re capable of, physically, until you try. The demoralizing part is that you fail; in fact you fail a lot and you suffer the consequences for trying. You are modestly optimistic and walk half a mile further at the wrong time. And you cry. Or, if you’re like me, your heart cries and your body goes cold. Your brain sighs like a passive aggressive mother, you should have known you couldn’t do that. Every difficulty is a chance to blame yourself and boy, do the difficulties never stop coming!
In the dark that night, in the silence, I did not cry. My chest did throb with fireworks, though. A good ol’ fashioned anxiety attack! And for what, really? A bit of cold, which I didn’t even feel yet, and for the privilege of being alive and with myself in a beautiful place?
Unfortunately, “myself” can be a difficult companion. With nothing to distract her, the things I already knew and accepted that I desired began to scream inside of me with an urgency and a fervor that shocked me, like a child wailing so hard she can’t breathe. I have been told that I cried like that as a child. One of my sisters told me that sometimes they’d slap me in the face to get me to finally breathe because my face would start to go purple. It turns out that I’m still in me, crying like that, stuck in the muck of a deep, explosive exhale, a desperate attempt to rid my body of all sorrow.
Breast cancer made me sharply inhale for a time, but it doesn’t stay that way forever. I can see that now. The present fades when I’m not working to maintain it.
I imagine my neural pathways like the chilly rainforests of the Pacific Northwest, damp and mossy with well-worn trails. Leave it better than you found it, they say, but my mind’s carefully tended trails are anxiety. They are trails that I am desperate to abandon. In this case leaving it better than you found it means trying to let those old trails become overgrown while forging new ones in the thickets with precise swings of a machete.
I don’t know how, but I slept. The power returned at some point during the night and I awoke to a fully charged phone, WiFi, and a little sweaty from the heat returning without open windows to air out the cabin. I plodded about in my matching J Crew tartan pajamas and sheepskin-lined moccasins, which isn’t a vintage fair isle sweater but is a little filmic in its way, I suppose. I made coffee. I opened the windows.