Emerging from the Cocoon

New York City is a place defined by its shifting identities: the store on the street corner that used to sell vintage porn is now busy marketing vintage sweaters. The Broadway theatre that once housed a Disney musical is now packing seats for a new AIDS play. The friends that you used to meet for tequila shots in the Lower East Side are now spending their evenings watching Elmo’s Playland with their one-year old on the Upper West Side. Real estate fluctuates, hot spots fade. It seems no matter where you turn, the city is inviting you to become something previously unimagined.

When I arrived in New York last week to visit my east coast ‘home,’ I was initially apprehensive about re-approaching the island after undergoing such a dramatic and at times traumatic transformation. I had lived here for five years. I was a very different person then, from my tastes and style to a deeper understanding of myself. My energy was dramatically different, my understanding of the world and relationships. Most of all, what I valued was very different. The buzz and frenetic pace of the city swept me up and carried me. Returning again after a year and a half of chemotherapy, I was unsure at first whether the city would consume me and spit me out. My schedule became booked rather quickly. Apparently cancer makes you a popular guy. Sitting with close friends, many of whom I haven’t seen since before my diagnosis, I was nervous at first. How would I impart to them the magnitude and scale of these past sixteen months? Would they embrace my changes or try to hold on to an old, fixed identity.

I discovered something surprising. Life has gone on without me. Thank God. New shows, new careers, new boyfriends. More often than not, I've ended up asking a thousand questions, just trying to catch up with the pace of my friends' lives. It’s silly to have to admit, but retreating into a sort of chemo-induced cocoon, I lost sight of the world’s inherent revolution, too preoccupied—for a season—with my own. Friends are older and a little more grounded, having transitioned into a new chapter, a new awareness. But they still retain the essence of who they were before. That never left. They are just more fully realized versions of the people I used to run around with four or five years ago. I feel less intimidated by my own transformation when I step back and put that in perspective. All we are ever doing is transforming, reinventing ourselves. To be human is to change. Grace, I believe, is to understand this paradox and to allow change to move you, knowing that your essence will still be there after it’s all over.

Maybe this city is forever reinventing itself. But this morning, I saw a man urinating in the corner of the subway station. Some things will never change, thank God.

System Down

Lately I’ve had the oddest feeling. It began with my finger, a small nick that several weeks later became swollen and infected. Next, the simple act of flossing produced copious amounts of blood in my mouth which also became infected, causing sores all over the roof and sides. Cutting myself while shaving one day caused a bacterial infection—a rash—all around my mouth. Then most recently, a small bit of sinus congestion led to full-scale bronchitis. I examined the evidence, and deduced that my immune system was on the fritz. I went to the hospital and the doctors confirmed my fears. My ANC (absolute neutrophil count) is less than 300. A normal person’s count falls somewhere in the range of 1500 to 2400. Below 500 and the doctors consider you severely neutropenic, extremely susceptible to bacterial infections or even pneumonia, and more likely than not they will hold off on administering chemotherapy. The news was somewhat shocking. I didn’t expect to see my immune system drop so low during maintenance chemotherapy. Isn’t this supposed to be the ‘easy’ stuff?

I did what any sane person in my situation would do. I went to a dive bar, got drunk and played pool.

Sometime around 11, a friend showed up with some others. We ordered another round and swapped quirky stories. I ended up in conversation with this one guy. He was curious why I didn’t get out more often. I told him the news I was out celebrating. He put his hand on my shoulder blades and offered his condolences. I laughed. In all honesty, I did everything I should have. My life is so obsessively regimented these days. I take certain pills at specific times, I eat special mixtures of high-immune boosting food every few hours. I hydrate in between meals. I exercise moderately. I do this day after day after day after day. I go to sleep sometimes at 9:30 on a Saturday night, careful to give myself enough rest. There are days when one in the morning might as well be one in the afternoon. Both find me lying in bed, eyes wide open, staring at the ceiling, organizing the details of my wellness. Moderation, discipline and caution. And in the end, chemo takes you down regardless. It continues to grind at my sanity. So I took the night off, I declared to this stranger. I slammed my fist on the bar table, my gaze wobbly. “Sometimes…sometimes don’t you just…don’t you just wanna go out to a bar and dress your best and flirt with guys and kick back with friends and drink more than you should and stumble home later than you planned?! Sometimes, don’t you just…don’t you just wanna…” My eyes drifted off with the end of my sentence. “Feel like your alive?” He offered. I stared blankly at my beer, and my new friend tapped his bottle against mine, some sort of celebration.

Wonderful

I was at yoga the other day when I ran into an old high school acquaintance. We hadn’t seen each other in years. We began casually catching up as we laced our shoes and put on our coats. I kept the focus on her to avoid the inevitable conversation I knew was lurking ahead. Finally, she asked me, “so what have you been up to?” I responded, “nothing.” Right. “I just moved into a house with my brother and sister.” “Are you working or going to school?” she responded. “Neither,” I replied. I can flat-out lie, or I can brace myself for what will follow. I told her about being diagnosed with leukemia and receiving chemotherapy treatment over the last year. She looked at me, smiling widely, and said, “that’s just wonderful.”

It is, to date, the most bizarre response I’ve ever heard when telling someone the news. Maybe she didn’t actually hear what I said. Or maybe she’s on prozac, in which case everything short of nuclear war would be ‘just wonderful.’ Her words stayed with me throughout the day, as we turned our backyard into an Oktoberfest housewarming party. I mingled with friends and family, many surprised to see my hair beginning to grow out. I caught people up on my recent ventures into hippy Hawai’i living and all things raw. Later in the evening I was talking with my good friend Andy about how I stumbled on Puna, Hawai’i as my next destination. This travel experience is different from any other because it came from a place of quiet internal questioning, months and months spent asking my spirit and body what they needed, not only to be sustained, but to be truly happy.

Few if any would look at me and envy my position or what I’ve been going through. Few people, especially young people, like to be reminded that we are finite beings, that our end could be just around the corner. On the other hand, I wouldn’t trade the experience for anything. Now yes, it sucks. Don’t get me wrong. Sucks bollocks. But in moments of clarity I see this journey as an opportunity to have stepped out of a spiritual, emotional and physical pattern that easily could have continued for years, if not decades. It has forced me to sit still and listen to myself quietly, intimately, asking only of myself, “what do you need?” The results, as in the case of Puna, have left me in awe. I am learning how to navigate from a place of peaceful self-inquiry--the heart, not the ego. I told Andy how funny it was that I could have spent the next thirty years searching for a place like Puna, and yet all it took was me sitting myself down for a while and asking, with all sincerity, “what do you need?” The most demanding crucible, it turns out, brought me the simplest enlightenment. And that is—to borrow a phrase—just wonderful.