One year (and counting) in crip time!

Hello friends and family, I hope you all are doing well. Things, like in most places still under lockdown, are pretty much the same over here.  I am still trying to do work. Greg is still trying to (and succeeding at) baking bread. I go for my treatments once every three weeks, and we go on walks and get to sit outside more as the weather gets nicer. but in general, we are in a vortex of time and a confine of space that in many ways, as I mentioned in my last post, is pretty similar to the last year of my life as a cancer patient. It's been this view, day in and day out:

I did reach a pretty big milestone a few weeks back- a year since my diagnosis, or my cancerversary, as folks in the club like to call it. I wish I could say that Greg and I had a big old party and celebrated me still being alive, but if I'm being honest, I was in a funk about it all week. I thought a lot about the ambitious and productive person that I was a year ago, pre-illness.* I got angry reliving the long and meandering process of my diagnosis, and the doctors who took over a year to get me from first finding that lump to treating it. And more than anything, I thought about how a 'return to normal' is simply not possible, not only because of the current pandemic and its limits, but also because cancer has irrevocably changed my body, mind, and life.  

What did we do as I rode my emotional rollercoaster? Well, we picked up wings from this old-school bar in our neighborhood- the same bar that we went to the day that Greg picked me up from my first and last mammogram, the appointment that ended in the doctor telling me he was almost positive what he saw in my images was breast cancer**:

 Memories of that day, that week, that time, flashed back to me like an incomprehensible movie trailer cut together. Waking up shivering at the crack of dawn everyday, wondering if I would ever sleep past 5 am again. Sitting in the backyard and making calls to friends and family to tell them news that shocked them each time and was becoming increasingly stale to me. Crying into a beer at the back of that old-school bar, just two newlyweds going from talking about when to have kids to wondering if I would survive our first, second, third year of marriage. 

Of course, I have survived our first year of marriage, and I'm getting close to surviving our second year. Statistically speaking, I am likely to survive our third. After that, things are still looking pretty okay, but who knows. Cancer pulls the veneer of certainty that the privileged like myself have had their whole life out from under you and shows you how you are one duplicating cell away from a very regimented form of chaos. I know that is counterintuitive. And I'm rambling. Sigh.

 Masked and on the move. 

What did I want to write about today? Oh yes. Crip time. Emily recently sent me this wonderful article by disability scholar and activist Ellen Samuels on crip time, or the idea that disabled folks live, "with a 'flexible approach to normative time frames' like work schedules, deadlines, or even just waking and sleeping." This article, more than anything that I've read so far, has encapsulated what cancer has done to my sense of how the hours, days, and weeks passed by. It has articulated this nagging feeling I've had over the past year that cancer is not linear, even though people really, really want it to be. This passage from the article is worth quoting at length:

Crip time is time travel. Disability and illness have the power to extract us from linear, progressive time with its normative life stages and cast us into a wormhole of backward and forward acceleration, jerky stops and starts, tedious intervals and abrupt endings. Some of us contend with the impairments of old age while still young; some of us are treated like children no matter how old we get. The medical language of illness tries to reimpose the linear, speaking in terms of the chronic, the progressive, and the terminal, of relapses and stages. But we who occupy the bodies of crip time know that we are never linear, and we rage silently—or not so silently—at the calm straightforwardness of those who live in the sheltered space of normative time.

This is just perfect. The non-linearity and uncertainty of disability and illness just don't fit into how most of us view time, productivity, and life's milestones and progressions. The "impairments of old age while still young" hits me hard not only as a menopausal 32 year old, but as someone whose body and mind has become more creaky after a year of being drugged and cut into. I have never been so forgetful in my life. My body has never ached so much. I have never lacked as much focus as I do now. I also have never had a better understanding of the ableist ways that capitalism imposes productivity on collectives, forcing individuals to bootstrap themselves up with 'resilience' and 'grit' while assuming that those individuals all have the same physical and mental capacity for continual productivity. Does that even make sense? Again, I'm rambling. 

I've spoken and written about how covid is now challenging our collective "sheltered space of normative time." In a sense, we're all getting a bit of a taste of crip time. I'm a year out. I'm thinking about a marker of linear, normative time within the context of crip time, which is also occurring within the context of a global pandemic that has totally warped our collective sense of how the days go by. It's confusing and at times painful. Am I making any sense? 

*What did that person value? Am I still that person? Do I even what to be? 

**This tasted better than it looked, I promise.