Saturday, 8 November, 2025
This morning I walked to the store. I bought a Sausage McMuffin, which is a very rare thing for me to do, but today I thought why not. No egg. Just the sausage and pretend-cheese. In the Longo’s near the flat, I bought a machiato (single – semi wet, so she said – and I picked up two packs of marked-down meat (good till tomorrow) and bemoaned the fact I had hesitated too long for the last bag of marked-down gianduiotti and it was gone. While I was doing all this, I knew I was ready to write again. It’s been an age.
An age.
Why? At first it was just ennui, an unwavering sense of boredom with my surroundings. I wasn’t used to this milder interest in where I was. It wasn’t crushingly boring, but it just didn’t stir me. What to write about? I’ll confess that this feeling really hasn’t changed all that much. I don’t know if it will. But then last October everything got murky.
Cancer.
I am just putting it out there without explanation for now. I have written a lot in draft and email and chat and, as always, in my head and I feel ready to talk about it. I’m not quite sure how to go about it because some of you may not want to know. My plan right now is to start plopping things in here and make the subject line Breast Cancer Journey – xxx. That way, anyone who wants not to know, not to get inside my head, can skip those bits. When they’re all done, which I hope they will be, I’ll link them all. They’re part of me so I don’t think I want them to stand alone. Deal? (Do let me know so my hesitation moves to determination.)
So…Art Therapy. I’m in a group. We’re part of an art therapist’s next thesis. It’s hard. It’s much harder than I expected, but that’s because I hear the other women’s (yes, all women) stories. They’re bittersweet, crushing, sadder than I can explain. And then I feel lucky, and then I feel bad about feeling lucky, and then I feel maybe I’m not going to be lucky, and then I don’t know how I feel. But sad, yes sad.
I’ve not been pleased with what I’ve done. The other women draw abstract forms that express so much. They range from amateur to promising, the latter maybe more than that. My drawings are poignant, too complicated, too real (too?) and they all depict ‘home’ in various ways. What I’ve been writing about is being me – I just want to be me – because this journey creates an unreal feeling, a sense of having morphed into this unrecognisable person. It’s a person who feels detached, often unwell, and in my case certainly a nomad in more than the sense of where I call home.
This week the assignment was The Path –Â where is it, how does it look, are there signposts, are there forks, how does the path feel? So here is mine, the most complicated of the group and thoroughly me.
At the bottom of the picture is a barbed wire fence. It’s daunting, but if you look closely, there are a few gaps to wriggle through if you want to get onto the path. It lies, yellow (brick road, of course) just through the fence and begins. At first, there are many thorny bushes to make me hesitate moving forward, and although these start to disappear, they crop up here and there, showing that even near the destination there’ll be challenging times. On the right of the photo there are pleasant distractions, a tree stump to sit on, a swing for the fun of it. To the right is a duck pond with a bench to sit on. The top of the pond is swampy, it’s not all lovely. A thorn bush and stump block the path near the top – more determination is needed. Throughout, the trees are flourishing, and there are nests – this place can be nurturing. At the very end of the path – home. It’s yellow, with a yellow sun in the sky to echo that. Two smoking chimneys show that someone is home and there’s a welcome inside.
Not hard to interpret this. It’s a difficult journey, one I want to abort many times, where I feel I can’t go on. My love of photos that show gardens so wild that the houses are only barely visible is a metaphor for home being there, but you need to look for it.
I’ll do my very best to keep writing and share my journey. It will be here if you want.
One thing I haven’t mentioned is how bad my eyesight is now. I was due to get cataracts removed, and that went pear-shaped after my diagnosis. If you spot mistakes, it’s because I am seeing things in double-vision and in a faded version. Getting my eyes fixed will come next, but it’s a tough decision to allow my body to be invaded again so soon. Wish me luck!