dynamic elf

As someone with a rather rocky family health history, I generally lean towards extra testing and doctor visits whenever there's a question. And having recently turned 40, the time came to Talk To My Doctor About Mammograms.

Now I do also like to do my research on stuff when possible, and I wasn't entirely sold on mammograms (see this article for a rundown of why). So at my checkup last year, I chatted with my doctor and thought she had recommended not doing it. But then the question came up again this year and she said, basically: let's go with yes. So I did! I didn't have strong feelings against it personally, just mild ones at a policy level, so I figured, what harm can it do? I understood the risk of false positives.

Narrator voice: she did not understand the risk.

So I went to my appointment, had my boobs squished (ow!), had friendly comments from the technician about how perky my breasts were (whee!), and went on my merry way to work, determined to not go back the next year.

Later, in a meeting with my boss, my wrist kept buzzing.

Hey, look, it's a phone call from a number I don't recognize! [IGNORE]
They're calling again! [IGNORE]
ANOTHER call? Give up already! [IGNORE]
OK fine, grrrrr, I'll go answer. I do- and they've found an abnormality, they say. I need to come back for an ultrasound ASAP, they say. We schedule it for the following Monday. I try to be chill - this is literally the risk I had read about extensively, obviously I'm cool and prepared, and the shakes that I have that night are totally unrelated.

I spend the next three days obsessively reading about breast cancer and feeling my breasts. I can't find the lump. I am fully prepared to go to my ultrasound and laugh off the negative result I get and still not go back for another mammogram for a decade.

I decide to take the whole day off as a sick day even though the appointment will be short. "I'll enjoy the time", I think. "That's it, it's just a good excuse for some down time."

I sleep a lot.

mek takes me out to get food at Forge and then brings me to my appointment, and I am getting less good at pretending it's all okay, but at least it will be over soon. They won't let me take a photo of the ultrasound to post to twitter and laughingly show everyone the tiny lump I have grown, and I feel slightly petulant until they explain to me that it isn't a cyst, it's tissue, and it's too small to feel but they need to take a biopsy of it and I kind of nod and the nice nurse who complimented my "sweet kicks" is now telling me how big it is (1.5cm, so roughly an olive pit) and how the biopsy works (a really big needle and some novocaine, just in your boob instead of your gums, and you get to watch it on the ultrasound cam!) and I'm smiling and nodding still and I understand but it all feels so surreal.

So now I get to wait a month. First I meet with the surgeon (she's a little fireball!, says the nurse), then the next day there's the biopsy, then a week later I meet with the surgeon again to learn and discuss the results.

At every step, I get a little bit further from reading medical studies and a little more scared. I no longer feel like I understand the risk of a false positive. I no longer intrinsically grasp that I almost certainly do not have cancer. "I'm not that stressed, it's just scary," I think to myself, and then the next day my back seizes up and I can't walk. And now I get to wait a month.

Even if it turns out that I do have breast cancer, and not a harmless fibroadenoma, it really doesn't look like it'd be the big scary type. I think the worst reasonable scenario is that I have the little lump removed and we're done. And if this happens, I am definitely not going to recommend to all of my just-turning-40 breast-having pals to get mammograms, because I still think it's a bad policy.

But right now, I gotta be honest, I'm a little scared.

Here is what I want more of:

Play.
Color.
Bicycling.
Adventure.
Naps.
Things I haven’t done before.
Beauty.
Intention.

What do you want?

A week or two ago, I read an article in the New York Times (oh Times, I still can’t quit you) about turning your phone to grayscale to make it more boring. The idea, says the article, is that if your phone is less exciting, you will be less hooked on it in bad ways. And while I love how much I can stay in contact with the world via my phone, there is no denying that I spend too much time looking at it when I would rather be doing something else.

I’m all for a good brain hack, so I gave it a whirl. Took the color out of my phone, but set the Accessibility Shortcut to bring the colors back if I needed them to look at a photo. Instantly my feeling was UGH, WHAT HAVE I DONE? What Puritan anti-fun bullshit is this, deliberately sucking the joy and beauty out of an object? Even the Times article has called it making your phone “worse”, and I had to say I agreed.

For a few days I kept finding that I had turned the colors back on just for a moment and then left them on. Inevitably I would notice this when I felt myself getting sucked in and cycling through apps without motive. But as I’ve become better and better about leaving it grayscale, I think it’s working. Now, to me, the bright colors and red badges on my home screen look shocking. And I haven’t done any kind of systematic analysis, but it certainly feels like I’m more likely to perform the following magic trick:

* Pick my phone up for a purpose
* Use it for that purpose
* Put it back down again.

One pleasant side effect of making the phone less interesting to look at is that it makes the world MORE interesting. I’m spending more time casually observing things, which has always been one of my favorite pastimes, so that’s cool too. Also, I love seeing people’s selfies and Instagram photos in grayscale. I always check them in color too, but it feels like I get a secret window into the composition.

So I dunno! My brain often doesn’t generalize to other people’s brains, but I’m finding this exercise more interesting and joy-filled than I had expected to, based on that initial OH FUCK YOU, PURITANS reaction.

If you’ve tried it: how’s it working for you?

I forgot about livejournal for a while there. I still love this place. If you've written sometihng interesting, recently, please link me to it in comments; catching up is hard and seems impossible.

So, N is 9. Very 9. 9 all over the place. She has crushes. Her body is starting to change. She's still full of ideas and plans and jokes, but I can see her adult self beginning to poke out here and there; I can't quite say why it makes me teary-eyed, but it does. It's sort of like staring the beauty of the universe straight in the face - I flinch.

It's not that she herself is beautiful (though she is), or that I am nostalgic for when she was littler and I could scoop her up and make the world stop (though I am) - it's that I am beginning to see so clearly the passage of time and the cycles in it. I see that this is who I will be ceding the world to, just as my parents did to me.

She commented recently that she didn't understand "happy tears". Tears, yes! Happiness, of course. Emotions too big to contain, all the time. But she does not get why an excess of happiness makes adults cry. And I'm thinking - when are the times that happiness makes me cry? I think they're all inflection points and times of transition. It's change. Change makes me cry: weddings, divorces, coming-of-age narratives, funerals. Watching someone step into their own power. A child growing up. A friend, drifted away.

And maybe change makes me cry as an adult, but didn't as a kid, because every change has a bit of loss in it, even good ones. And loss changes shape as you get older.

So I don't know. Sometimes, when she asks me a complicated question, I'm able to knock it out of the park. And sometimes I flounder. I'm quite certain I did not manage to convey in any way why adults cry when they're happy sometimes. But I haven't been able to shake the question, either. And I keep coming back to: I don't know, kid, but some day maybe you can figure it out and tell me.

I should have a lot to say right now but I don't.

I made new horns for my helmet last night. They're sparkly. One pair is sparkly AND it glows in the dark. Take that, patriarchy.

OK, look. There's a lot of rape culture. We all grew up in it and we live in it, and I like to think that we do what we can to help shift our collective course in a less rapey direction, but that's a tall order and it's not easy to shift something so large. It's not easy to be 'mean'.

What I'd like us to do instead of worrying about being mean: be supportive. Figure out how to earn, deserve, and keep the trust of the people we love. Figure out how to build supportive environments full of consent and a network of support and affection. Don't tolerate mean and abusive bullshit. Have hard conversations, but also go for picnics and go skinny-dipping at Walden in the middle of the night just because it's summer and it's hot and we're alive.

We all have power, people. Let's use it to keep building this awesome world we're in.

This weekend was my first time visiting Open Studios, ever. I never wandered around it before trying to exhibit, and then later I got caught up in my crazy portrait experiment. But I needed a year off. I flirted with this last year, taking an hour to go visit Vernon Street with longueur, and this year I just took the whole damn weekend. And it was great! I finally saw the Museum of Modern Renaissance, and Hilary Scott's house, and miss_chance's studio. I got ideas upon ideas, which is (oddly) what I've been missing. I'm trying to hit my art reset button. I still love portraits - but I need to do something deeper, or bigger, than what I have been doing. What? I don't know.

I'm needing to hit a lot of reset buttons, recently. I'm closer to the edge than I like to be: less generous, less flexible, less crazy. It feels like being on the cusp of a Big Change. It feels like a growth spurt looks like, when my kid goes through them. Suddenly everything is huge; tomorrow, maybe I'll be someone else. I worry, of course, that in the meantime I'm shortchanging everyone and everything: I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Thank you for being here, and listening, even when I'm hiding under a blanket, even when I'm crying in the cleaning-supplies aisle of Rite-Aid for no reason.

I went on a solo bike ride Saturday morning. This is the first time in years that I've set out on a ride just for the sake of riding. I had a course planned - just a simple 50-55 miles - and I thought, this'll be great. I can be back by noon, and I'll feel super accomplished. But after only about 10 miles, my traitorous ankles started acting up. I had to stop by the side of the road and stretch, and massage, and snack, and stretch some more, and set my sights lower. After about 14 miles, I had to stop again. More stretching, more snacking, more scaling back. In the end, it was just under 30 miles. I should be proud - a healthy ride! Hours of biking! I iced my ankles afterward and then took a nap. It was good for me - a good start. But I guess I can't ride 60 miles cold, anymore. No matter; I'll do what I can. I'll try again. I'll be good to myself, and keep trying, because I had forgotten how quiet and meditative hours-long rides can be. But: why can't I hold everything at once? There is so much, and really hardly any me at all.

Which kind of happened last week, actually. Feeling better now - back on my bike, out in the sunshine, I'm remembering to tend the quiet and corporeal parts of my life - but still, I'd rather push too many buttons and jam up like a typewriter from time to time than stay idle.

And so, a poem for you all:

Wake-up Call
by Mary Jo Salter


The water is slapping wake up, wake up, against the boat
chugging away from Venice, infinite essence
of what must end because it is beautiful,

Venice that shrinks to a bobbing, pungent postcard
and then to nothing at all as the automatic
doors at the airport obligingly shut behind you.

Re-enter a world where everything is the same,
where you’ve gone slack again, and don’t even know it,
so unaware that you actually shrug to yourself,

I’ll be back, and yes, for some lucky stiffs it’s true,
sometimes it’s you, you’re sure to get more chances
at Venice, and Paris, and that blessed, unmarked place

where you sat on a bench and he kissed you that first time,
so many kisses, you hoped he would never stop,
you can hope, at least, not ever to forget it,

or forget how your babies, latching onto your breast,
would roll up their eyes in an ecstasy that was comic
in its seriousness, though your joy was no less grave,

but you’re not going back to so much, and more and more,
the more you live there’s more not to go back to,
and what you demand in your gratitude and greed

is more life in which to get so attached to something,
someone or someplace, you’re sure you’ll die right then
when you can’t have it back, something you don’t even know

the name of now, but will be yours before receding
as an indispensable ache; what you’re saying
is Lord, surprise me with even more to miss.