Barnacles

In her book “The Light We Carry”, Michelle Obama quotes Tracee Ellis Ross talking about her best friend:

“I couldn’t do this life thing without her…I am a barnacle on her life.”

Michelle (hey girl) then says:

“If you’ve ever spent time by the ocean and encountered these bump-sized, hard-shelled crustaceans melded to the undersea rocks and the bottoms of boats, you’ll know there’s nothing more stubborn or solid than a barnacle. The same might be said of an exceptional friend. If you’re lucky, you might end up with at least a few melded into your life, people who become stalwart and unshakable, the friends who accept you without judgment, show up for the hard stuff, and give you joy - not just for a semester, or for the two years you live in the same city, but over the course of many years. Barnacles are not showy, either, which I see as also true of the best friendships. They need no witnesses. They are not trying to accomplish something that can be measured or cashed in upon; the substance mostly happens behind the scenes.”

The whole book is gold; if I could, I would send everyone I know a copy.

And I have been obsessed with this idea of your people as barnacles… the people who you don’t need to see every day or talk to that often, but the people who are Your People, who you can see every week or so, or every couple of years, and yet have an innate knowing that they see you, they feel you, they know you, and you see them as well, and these are your barnacles. Maybe you just grab a coffee, or you spend a weekend in Deep Conversation, or you have a sudden text marathon. But it doesn’t matter because you can just be In It together.

It is a reciprocal and symbiotic relationship that is not transactional.

It is a relationship that you are engaged in because of the sharp edges and bumps and crevices and hard spots. Because you have a deep knowledge of what lies below the surface and you choose to embrace all the parts of the barnacle. Because the value lies in the whole barnacle, not just the parts that look pretty.

Sometimes a person who you thought was a barnacle falls off your rock, and that can be a significant loss. Maybe you realized that it happened, or maybe you looked for them and they weren’t there anymore. That can be a soul-deep grief experience, and require a process where you realize that maybe you didn’t get to choose to hold onto them, and you have to sort out how to come to terms with that.

Maybe there’s a new barnacle or even a new constellation of barnacles. And isn’t that a beautiful thing? That even though we might lose some due to time or circumstance or personal differences or life philosophies or perspectives, new ones can come along to shore us up. And that we, too, can be new barnacles for other people.

Being open to all of this though can be hard. It can be painful to lose barnacles, and maybe we even have to scrape them off ourselves. And those experiences can make us not want to make space for new ones because it can feel hard and scary to let new ones attach.

Cancer really brings all of this to the surface. Who shows up, how they show up, how it makes you feel, how cancer makes other people feel. How sometimes the emotional labor that falls on you comes from strange places. And also how you’ve shown up for people in the past, and maybe what emotional labor you’ve put on other people that you didn’t realize. And choosing how you want to move through the world moving forward. And how when you have a chronic illness, because that’s what cancer is, sometimes it feels like the world is moving by and you are stuck in place, just waiting to get to go back out there.

I’ve been working hard on grounded positivity. Not forcing sunshine and rainbows, but being grounded in choosing what feelings I lead with and which ones I recognize and then let pass. My favorite question, one that I ask clients all the time, is “What purpose does that serve?” And so I ask this of myself so that I can talk about how I feel and what I need so that I can get back out there. But when I get back out there I am not going to be the same, I can’t be. I’m not. We’re not. And that’s okay. Because this isn’t going to go away, this chronic illness that might be very invisible sometimes and very visible at other times. It’s a thing, it exists, but it doesn’t define us.

We have gotten to spend time in different ways in the last few months with some really hard-core barnacles. Actually, all sorts of barnacles. And I feel so very fortunate to have this variety of barnacles that I can conjure with my phone and even sometimes in person. But I’ve also been really sad about who is missing. And that’s okay too. And as I’ve processed this I’ve thought about what it means to save space for new versions of the old barnacles. Because the magic of being human and our innate messiness is that we can re-form. And if the circumstances are right, maybe those missing barnacles make their way back.

So.

Chemo number 4 is Wednesday! This has been a long and fast two months. I’m so proud of myself and everything that has happened so far.

I’m meeting with my doctor on Wednesday after chemo, and I already have the MRI scheduled for June 6th. After that, we’ll know what the next choices are.

I had a really great weekend, and today I had a massage and I am ready for Wednesday.

xo

A little art therapy that I did last week after my reiki session. Part of my grounded positivity process.