The past few posts have been hard. I’m trying to keep a level head on an emotional situation. I’m sure they’ve been harder to read. When things get hard and I’m short on time I tend toward getting to the point in an unvarnished fashion – so apologies for the firehose but you’re getting it straight up. That’s where I’ve been living the past week.
I’ve run the Boston marathon 3 times. I was thinking about this yesterday as I’ve been getting stronger in anticipation of my next battle. Anyway my training has never been ideal for lack of time (NO lack of commitment!). For each one I offset this lack of training with mentally hard runs (unscientifically, foolishly). Weeks before the race I often would run to the top of twin peaks in SF just outside my house, at night in the cold fog with a headlamp. I avoided doing it for a long time because it was hard and not very appealing. Then I decided to make friends with it. It was pretty dumb and no substitute for preparedness. But I will say the mental hardship is something I can certainly carry forward into this situation. Really it’s not about physical though that seems to be what dominates the conversation.
Anyway I just did that run for the first time yesterday since completing chemo. I’m gearing up for an even harder battle, the drugs are getting more powerful. Today I went to the gym to test my strength and see where I’m at with my one-rep max to bodyweight ratio (my normalized standard of personal strength). I pulled off a 1.8 (meaning I can deadlift 1.8 times my bodyweight). That’s pretty good for me and where it was pre-chemo so I’m feeling physically strong now.
I had a long and interesting conversation with my sister Ilana yesterday. We were comparing notes on some hard times our family suffered when we were kids. She fell off the world for several years and only somewhat recently have we reconnected. It’s really deep. I was the oldest, 12 when my parents started arguing (a lot) and 13 when they finally divorced. During that dark period we all responded in our own ways to the challenge. My sister observed that I was always focused and kind of above it all, that I withdrew into a world of introspection. I recall also responding by turning all that energy I saw as wasteful splashing at the water’s surface (arguments, yelling, acting out) into something useful. In contemplating this tough time in my life I realize that I’ve had a mentality that may not be all that healthy. I’ve been contemplating this little guy below (that’s me at, maybe 7 years old) at the time his world ripped apart at 13 with the collapse of his family.
That time is kind of a blur but pieces stand out. In response to those feelings I started writing and I’ve really been doing it more days than not ever since. Always for myself and with the purpose of processing things objectively. I’d go into our basement, sit on the floor and just pour out my thoughts and emotions into a journal. Like for hours. The first journal was memorable. It was a creamy white, velvety spiral- bound drawing book. Nothing special, just musings of a 13 year old boy. Perhaps not a lot has changed – here I am doing the same thing in response to challenge! At one point I had several full boxes of these journals (high idea-phoria will do that!) and years later I dispatched them all to the junkyard. I stand by that decision, interesting as they would be to retrieve. Life is ephemeral and don’t forget it!
What I can say is that something in that kid decided to turn within instead of railing against the world. That’s been his attitude since then: I can turn that energy into myself and improve, learn, do something that might make things better. I was talking with some friends the other day about focus. I’m not sure if that’s something I was born with but regardless my response to chaos has always been focus and in that regard it’s been a coping mechanism to hardship. And to be frank I like that. I like being focused and aggressive as that puts me in my element. I wonder if I sometimes engineer situations to elicit that feeling. That’s probably why comfort is so bothersome to me; because I let my guard down and lose focus which brings me into a non-ideal mental state. Perhaps, if I were to speculate, there’s something stuck inside him that is screwing with the immune system as my sister suggested. Now we’re on the edges but immunology is complicated and anyone pretending to understand the relationship between one’s mentality and immunity is probably lying, except to say that positive beats negative. My friend Geoff reminded me of Stephen Jay Gould’s excellent essay, the median isn’t the message on just this topic the other day, here’s an excerpt: Attitude clearly matters in fighting cancer. We don’t know why (from my old-style materialistic perspective, I suspect that mental states feed back upon the immune system). But match people with the same cancer for age, class, health, socioeconomic status, and, in general, those with positive attitudes, with a strong will and purpose for living, with commitment to struggle, with an active response to aiding their own treatment and not just a passive acceptance of anything doctors say, tend to live longer. A few months later I asked Sir Peter Medawar, my personal scientific guru and a Nobelist in immunology, what the best prescription for success against cancer might be. “A sanguine personality,” he replied. Fortunately (since one can’t reconstruct oneself at short notice and for a definite purpose), I am, if anything, even-tempered and confident in just this manner. me as a boy