A Year Ago in the Sunflowers
about the magic I made, felt, lost, and then found
“Take your broken heart and turn it into art”- Carrie Fisher
The Nuclear Medicine Department is actually not as cool as it sounds. For one, I expected guys in Monsters Inc. style hazmat suits, but the doctors actually just wear several layers of masks and gloves. Secondly, there’s a ton of ⚠️ HAZARD ⚠️ signs everywhere announcing “RADIOACTIVE MATERIAL”, but when they bring out the nuclear medicine in question, it’s a little pill, about the size of a Vitamin C supplement.
It’s funny, my doctor walked in with a group of younger doctors in their residency stages holding what looked like a small time capsule on a silver tray. He opened the capsule and inside was a slightly smaller, different colored capsule. He did this about four times, each capsule getting smaller, like a set of Russian Dolls. At the end: my trojan horse: Radioactive Iodine- designed to infiltrate and eradicate any leftover cancer and thyroid tissue.
Thirdly, the experience cumulates in what feels like a lack-luster fireworks show and you walk away with a dozen pamphlets providing several emergency numbers to call in case you accidentally vomit up nuclear waste (I’m not kidding), since you can’t just Clorox it away.
I manifested a room full of sunflowers waiting to sit with me in isolation when I got home. My friend, Haley, put together “The Sunflower Project” because I had read that historically, scientists have planted sunflowers in land that’s been contaminated by radiation to clean and heal the terrain.
The idea came to me in the shower, the morning after I read about the scientists and the sunflowers. As shampoo slid down my body and water and suds washed over my closed eyes, I saw an image of me sitting in my bed, the room surrounded by sunflowers.
It looked like sheer MAGIC. It felt magical that my whole life I’d been drawn to sunflowers, never really knowing why, until that moment.
Sometimes I think about how God gives us pieces of the puzzle before we realize that we're even putting one together or that they have purpose or will eventually have an earth-shatteringly important meaning in our lives. Things I’ve loved for years and took for granted, I cherish now and revel in their safety.
A room full of sunflowers felt like the magic and safety I needed to get me through a week of isolation while being radioactive and actively killing any cancer in my body. So Haley got to work and when I got home from the hospital, there really was a room, full of hundreds of sunflowers.
The result of so many people who knew me, and some who didn’t but heard my story and wanted to send me joy, the result of audacious faith and creativity: magic.
I spent my week in isolation, cycling through very intense emotions, and feeling both glorious and sick at the same time. How can your spirit feel like a rainbow but your body, a weak mush of skin and bones? I’ve learned that sometimes both things are true.
June 6, 2024:
“I feel heavy today. What’s wrong body?”
June 10, 2024:
I journal my way to the root of my heaviness, that slowy has been building until it results in an epic crying meltdown at the beach with my partner’s family. You can only keep Overwhelm locked in a dark closet for so long until eventually it learns how to shape shift and melt out of the crevices and keyhole.
I write “I’m disappointed in myself”, but in reality, I’m disappointed in God.
A year ago I was sitting in the sunflowers, dreaming of the last day of treatment when I’d hear the words “clean scans, NO EVIDENCE OF DISEASE”. I laid in my bedroom field of sunflowers dreaming of a life that had to be better than that current moment. “Surely, the universe rewards us when we go through hard times. We don’t suffer in vain. We can’t. I just can’t bring myself to believe that”.
Disappointment is a bitter knife that cuts deep, releasing all your inner demons if you’re not quick to get the wound under control.
My life is so different from what I dreamed when I was laying amongst the sunflowers. I am so different than who I thought I’d be. I thought I’d get to go back to being the powerful and accomplished artist that I’d been prior to my diagnosis. I thought I’d get to make back all the money I spent of healing my body. I thought I’d get to be hormonally balanced and more in control of my anxieties. But I’m not. I haven’t gotten any of those things.
The gifts and blessings I have gotten, don’t feel like enough on the bad days. “It’s not enough that I survived if I can’t make a living doing what I love” is a horrible thing my ego stands proudly on a mountaintop and shouts at God. She’ll be the death of us all, my ego. Nothing’s ever enough for her. Everything happens to her.
My spirit meekly mentions that it is an incredible feat that I’ve gained back 9 lbs since getting to my lowest weight since high school: 100 lbs... I’m stronger now! My ego frowns and mentions how 9 lbs comes with more body to fit into my jeans. sigh.
My spirit tries again and mentions how I haven’t been back on a set directing, but I got an artist residency opportunity for the Summer and it’ll be so cool to have an adventure! My ego rolls her eyes, “good luck paying the bills with ‘an adventure’. sigh.
How can I hold grief for the things that have happened in my life while having space to hold onto the life I am currently living? I think it starts with the word “and”.
For starters, trauma is not meant to be clutched onto, it is meant to be handled with care, acknowledged, accepted, thanked, and gently released into the wind with a promise to be kinder to oneself. If I hold onto trauma, she is big and messy and greedy and leaves no room for hope, or joy, or peace. So as much as I want to hold on and cry an ocean’s worth of tears for the version of me that was told she had cancer, the version of me who was sick and in pain, I also have to let her go.
Acceptance is a key part of healing trauma. I have to accept that I can’t ever change what happened. It happened. It’s part of my story. Pretending it wasn’t doesn’t serve anyone, especially not me— the body that gets stuck carrying it.
A year later and I’m still going through such a rough time. I’m feeling more lost and aimless and confused than I did a year ago. I don’t know why bad things happen to good people. I don’t know why life builds you up and then knocks you down just as fast. I don’t know why it takes so long to rebuild. Acceptance is holding that I don’t know SO many things, and I’m not supposed to. Having control in my life is a fruitless pursuit because none of us know what is ever going to happen.
I zoom out: All we can do is be here now. Now is all we have and wasting time living in a past we can't ever get back or in a future that hasn't happened is a waste of the magic (read: goodness) we can find in any current moment. There's always goodness. I remind myself that even if I can't see it, if I can feel my breath, I have one thing to be grateful for.
I zoom in: I made so much art during my week in the sunflowers. Every day I alchemized pain into magic. So why didn’t I share any of it? I don’t know. Maybe it felt too sacred. Maybe it didn’t feel good enough. Maybe I didn’t want to share it because sharing it made the fact that it happened so real. But not sharing it, and keeping it to myself all this time, doesn’t change the fact that it did happen. And because it happened, I am who I am now. And right now, I am disappointed. I’m feeling heavy because I spent a year trying to get over the trauma that happened by foraging ahead, bulldozing my pain, and trying to force the things I wanted into existence. And when I couldn’t accomplish them, I felt like a failure. I felt like my suffering was in vain. And I was incapable of reveling and relishing the unexpected goodness that found me, simply because it wasn’t what my ego wanted.
I zoom out: It was real. And I went through that. So I cry and I cry and I cry. I feel it all now, a year later, most likely because I never really let myself feel it before. In my perfect world, I never should have had cancer; no one should ever have cancer, or pain, or sickness, etc. I hate that it took my joy, my strength, my livelihood. I love that survived it. I love that it showed me that my joy, my strength, my livelihood don’t lie in my physical circumstances. They lie in me because I believe that in all things, God can bring forth good.
Acceptance is holding that cancer is now a part of my story. I answer my own question:
How can I hold grief for the things that have happened in my life while having space to hold onto the life I am currently living?
I hold space for the fact that I wish it had never been a part of my life and also I’m *so* grateful for the person that I am because it is a part of my life. Both things are true.
A year later, I’m here. I still have work to do. I don't have anything even remotely figured out. I have my memories, my dreams, my ability to find goodness in life, and the people who love me… so I seem to have everything that actually matters. If I died tomorrow, would I be satisfied? Would I be proud? I think I've done the best I could with what I've been given. I loved as hard as I could. God knows I dreamed as big as I could. I put a lot of color out into the world and if this was all the time I had, I'm happy with what I did.
And still, I dream for tomorrow and I will live brightly today, and I will hope that with however much time I have given in this life, I mostly do good and keep leaning towards joy.
I can always start again tomorrow, if God is willing. I know I am.
You can make today whatever you want it to be.
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