Winter Visit

So as I feared I've dropped off here a great deal since getting the positive news. I may have said before but I find it more of a challenge to speak about the upsides and happy parts of my story. It's not to most people I'm writing to and sharing this with, it's a particular and small sup-group that may not even exist but I hope one day may: fellow brain cancer battlers. I have been given great generosity and kindness, and support from my family and the people around me that sometimes I feel like isn't even fair. I'm being set up with a place to live that is of my dreams, and the potential to chase goals and adventures that go beyond where I even imagined. It's not some mansion or a trip around the world, it's a"minihome" on a decent sizes rural lot, a tractor for working on it, a quad for adventures, and the hope/dream of a boat to get back out to that ocean and return to shark fishing on. Yeah okay that's a lot. I've tried my best to be appreciative, to show my thanks, and just to be a good son to my parents for being so kind to me. I definitely haven't been perfect, but times haven't been quite as perfect as my brief account sounds either. Still amazing though.

But back to the point. What has been my huge underlying concern is that that's just not fair and not realistic, and it's going to make other people who could have to walk down this road feel like they can't relate to me and it loses its meaning. I guess I'm also scared of being judged as some spoiled rich kid. At the same time, the last thing I want to do is even be slightly dishonest. It's put me at a feeling of conflict and hesitation that I've allowed to just drive me away from here. What I need to do is just be honest, be careful in how I express myself, but not hold back the truth for fear of judgement. I've done things and been through things that have earned my own respect, and that was harder than earning the respect of others around me. It's time for me to carry myself forward with that.

So I've been transforming viciously mentally through this time period as well. I've been dealing with a huge change in my state of mind and approach to life. I've been coming to terms with some very serious part of myself I hadn't faced up against in years. The feeling of emotional release that began as I started to let myself believe in a chance to live further into life than I'd thought of for years continued and continued. I've laughed and cried more in the past few weeks than I did in years before. I've began to actually think of a future with real potential to do things, to grow, to experience life. It's pretty enjoyable. One thing I've been careful to remind myself of all along though is a slight hint of progress in chemo is a LONG way from defeating cancer. Even if chemo continues to be very successful, even if it goes beyond the hopes and dreams of predictions, there is nothing to say the little tiny hints that are left can't mutate and come back for me. I don't mean to say that in a depressing fashion. I actually am smiling a great deal. It's just that I need to be careful to remember that to hold myself properly in the balance between confidence and arrogance. I have intent and goals to be proactive in response to that added risk and keep myself from having to deal with that, or as I've said before, to fight it as well as I can. I just need to keep honest with how I approach it.

 I'm just pushing deeper and deeper with diet as it continues, and I've gained more clear resolution in how I'm going to pursue that moving forward. I've really continued down the same avenue as before and just gotten even a bit more serious with it. I'm shockingly close to a vegetarian now, even more than before, eating meat maybe a few times a week now. I'm eating seeds, nuts, yogurt, coconut, and veggies for pretty much all my meals. Smoothies all the time. Salad and unpasteurized cheeses.  I've gotten to the point where I'm not focusing on the taste of the food anymore, just the nutritional content, and that it tastes good enough I can get it in without irritating my stomach. I don't intend to hold it to that level long term. It's damn impressive how good it feels though. I've also continued to pursue the paleolithic/ketogenic/high fat low grain aspect. I've gotten further with it and it feels like my body has adapted to it now. I was getting fat cravings for a while but I just feel normal now. I do still definitely eat a high fat diet. My step-grandmother gave me chicken soup for dinner tonight, and I cooked it then added in a... shockingly large amount of butter, and then some coconut oil. God damn that was good soup. And I'm still losing weight and have no serious variance on blood tests! I think where I've come to now with my eating routine is significantly better than I've had it before and I hope to keep improving it. That's the key, I think it's great, but holy crap is there ever a ton of room for improvement!

My eating is pretty standardized. If you read before, the smoothie mixes from before are similar, but I'm adding Kale and more baby spinach more often, and going a lot heavier on seed content. My eating routine is very regular. I wake up, immediately rinse mouth with water, brush teeth, then have to drink hot prune juice (because of the surgical anti-nauseants, to keep the..system...working). I then drink about 2L of water with a bit of lemon in it, and start making my smoothie. I usually make a bit more than a L of smoothie, pretty dense. Probably getting most of my day's calories in that first smoothie. Later in the day I'll tend to go for salad decked with goat cheese (easy to digest) with nuts and fruit and stuff. Other munchies are raw fruit, raw veggies, hummus, rice crackers. Other major diet point would be raw eggs. Those feel damn good to eat and I actually even enjoy them now (yeah I know, bit messed up). I do have an occasional meal with meat in it. My last one(prior to soup) was a bastardized poutine of some strange form. It was a leg of duck, a bag of cheese curds( fresh from quebec) a can of beef gravy, and some coconut oil. My body seems to want lots of clean fats, lots of fruit and veggies, especially dark green veggies, and lots of nuts and seeds. I need to keep stocked on protein, and keep sugar up a decent basic bit. I also have to drink a TON of water. Minimum 6-8L a day now. I will wake up feeling pretty crappy, but if I go through this eating regimen and stick to everything I can have a good decently active day where I feel really good. Also as long as I eat a bunch of hash oil and smoke a decent bit too, can't forget that part. Going back to the food though, I've also formed a set of long term goals around that. Beginning next summer I'm going to get to work around my property at setting up a set of greenhouses and gardens to grow as much as I can of my own fruit and vegetables, and hunt, fish, and raise as much as I can of my own meat/eggs. I'll just start with basics, but there will be lots of room to keep building and it should be a great life project.

As for the treatment I've been reading more and more and the more I read the more I realize how little I know and how long it will take to actually learn everything I want to learn. There's no way I'll be able to learn everything I'd like to about managing treatment/cancer in time for the duration. I find that uplifting though. The fact there's room for improvement just means if things aren't going well I can keep stepping up to the plate more If there is still an ounce of power in my hands to resist this I will use it. And it seems like the more I read, the more I open my eyes, the more power I find thanks to the help of other people. The fact I can potentially use this treatment again, it's working this time, and I have the power to improve my management of the treatment for the next time, allows me to feel honest and balanced in opening myself to optimism about an actual meaningful, significant future. It felt like a certainty of death I had to embrace as a responsibility to be honest with myself before, but now it's just an added risk. I've discovered allowing that to settle in has also opened me up to myself way more. Old memories, old emotions, new emotions, all kinds of confusing, stressful, awesome, ridiculous, beautiful, bullshit. And the ability to reach into and touch parts of myself I forgot existed. I feel like my inner child is coming back to life maybe. It's kind of awesome but kind of has its downsides because I'm sort of not totally in control of some of that part of myself. I think that's partly just because I've been really stressed with all this too, but I definitely need to spend some time and care reckoning with these changes and what they mean.

One part that's kind of exciting is I feel like I'd really closed myself off to the idea of love and truly opening myself to such an experience, I felt like I'd be this destructive weight. I always pictured myself starting into a relationship with a girl, her finding out I have cancer, feeling obliged to be kind and deal with it, and then things just spiraling downhill. I saw how hard watching me go through surgery was on my whole family and on my girlfriend at the time (who I spoke to for the first time in a while recently, it was nice), and I pictured the torment of having a young person I loved who knew they were going to die, who couldn't/wouldn't even consider serious long term commitments because of a feeling of inability to make that promise, and then the experience of having to love them and watch them die, and I didn't want to do that to someone else. I thought it would be better for me to just enjoy the rest of my life as much as I can without worrying about that, enjoy friendship and masturbation and work and carry on. Even though it's still a lot more likely for me to die young than someone else, for some reason this hint of victory is all it takes for me to feel freed from that certainty and actually open myself to that. The fact I have a plan of attack for response, a life goal to do all that I can to resist it, is enough to let me at least try. I'm not exactly about to get out on the prowl, being on chemo means I'm not exactly maximally on top of my game (... game? could be an issue anyway) and I think going through this will leave me with some stuff in my head I need to deal with and come to terms with before I try to take on something else, but shit just the idea it's possible is pretty enjoyable.

That is just one reflection of this new feeling of embracing a more positive outlook on life. Alongside that feeling comes a great challenge I've been dealing with lately and one I definitely don't feel like I've found a resolution for: the balance between confidence and arrogance. I know, and have seen demonstrated over and over, the value of confidence. Believing in yourself seems to empower you on some almost magical level, if my drunk memories of high school dances are correct( ... ). At the same time though, tooting your own horn is not something I want to do and I think carries great weakness in itself. It's a huge need in life to always recognize your own weakness, vulnerabilities, need for improvement. It has been recognizing those that has let me find hope. When I took the cancer on as my own responsibility, a consequence of my own mistreatment of my body, it became easier to believe in my ability to empower the treatment and further enable its success. That change of mindset has enabled me to further improve my diet and lifestyle habit leaps and bounds. It requires knowing I've been a huge dumbass a ton of times before to see that it's actually really easy to do better and maybe that might help fix things! It's been introspective self-criticism that has revealed to me most of my best empowering moments and built my confidence the most. That demonstrates clearly the weakness of confidence. Too confident and you end up blind to those weaknesses, unable to accept criticism, and then from that you fall into stasis and end up becoming weak. To stay safe you need to always remember that no matter how good you are, you still actually are a total goof because everybody is, life is just that freakin complicated. That's been my answer anyway.

 As I get all these experiences which are empowering, which people tell me I deserve to feel great about, to be confident for, I don't want to go blind to my weaknesses and challenges and then end up not fighting as hard as I could, and losing when I could have tried harder. At the same time though, I need the confidence to keep trying, to believe in myself. I think it's about the tension between potential and actualization. I can believe in myself and a strength I find deep in myself but can't bring out. That strength seems when I look in to be great power, to be able to potentially carry me to great things, a burning fire ready to light a clear path forward. The trick is, it's really tricky to get it out and use it properly. If I try to bring it out raw I just burn myself and other people and that's no good. If When I bring it out in a presentable fashion, it turns out it's not so bright, the case I can build around it isn't exactly perfect, and maybe it's not getting all the air it should, and really perhaps it's moreso just a candle. Like everyone else's. I think it's pretty hard to let yourself out into the world, to tap into that strength. The big trick and one of the problems of confidence has been if I listen to the compliments and see what I see when I look in, I feel like I'm going to have to be cocky, because it looks better than other people's. The trick it took me 25 years to realize though is that's all perspective. It's what I see when I look in, combined with my highlight points. Big whoop that can look good, I'm sure everyone's can. It's like the gas for your candle, it doesn't matter how much gas you've got, it's how you burn it that counts. I hopefully will make it through this storm and burn a lot brighter afterwards.