Writer, researcher, music lover, cancer survivor with CMMRD ("double" Lynch syndrome)
I have three poems in Bindweed Magazine! The poems are on the website right now and they will be in the print version of the magazine in October. You can read them here!
Two of these poems are about my brother and the middle one is about me and my parents trying to distract ourselves from my illness back in the day. So they are really important to me and I’m quite proud of them, so I’m very happy to have them published!
A bit of time travelling this morning – this is the first poem I had published in a literary magazine. It was published in Obsessed With Pipework, a Flarestack publication, in 2006 when I was 18. Before that, I also had poems published in two anthologies (in 2004 and 2005, so at the age of 16 and 17), but this was my first magazine publication. I actually submitted a longer version of this poem, but the editor decided he liked the firs three lines and asked if he could just publish those. I still remember the full poem off by heart:
I think I feel self-conscious because I’m quiet. It’s not that I’m quiet because I’m anxious – my quietness is making me anxious. I am socially awkward because I am socially awkward. My very nature is doing this to me. What a riveting cycle.
I worry that when I’m quiet people will think I am boring and won’t want to hang around with me anymore. I don’t have any past experience to base this on except for one thing someone said about me and a friend parroted back to me when we were about seventeen. Yet it still makes me paranoid. So, that’s my personal discovery for the day, what was yours? Hopefully something a bit nicer.
I am officially seven years cancer-free tomorrow (as far as I know) and yes, I’m still harping on about it.
I had a dream I was at
an indoor market on a Thursday
night with my parents, not our
usual haunt but it was a
special marketplace selling
only old Beano and Dandy annuals.
Likely my parents and I were looking for
different things. I have trouble seeing
past the differences
most times
I was looking for my past
but maybe we were also all
looking for him
among those
dog-eared, yellowing pages with
crumbling spines like tree bark. I awoke
in a world where the inherited annuals I once had
are now long gone – to a charity shop, or
to collectors, or to children who already have or
soon will successfully reached adulthood, I hope.
If I get to bed late tonight it’s because I’m sat watching the one Linkin Park gig I went to on YouTube in its entirety.
It was Projekt Revolution in 2008 at Milton Keynes Bowl, and for some reason we were sat right up on the hill, not in the crowd where I have been for all my other gigs. It was the Jay Z era and he made an appearance, but I wasn’t interested in him. Another friend of mine was there with some other friends – he was closer, but he got hit on the head by a flying bottle near the beginning of their set and spent the rest of the night in the medical tent with a concussion.
This week I was honoured to be able to guest blog over at A Chronic Voice! My post talks about the different identities that may be associated with us after a cancer diagnosis, and whether illness forms part of our identity. You can check it out here: Does Illness Form Part of Your Identity? As always, thanks for reading and let me know what you think!
Trying to fight those meh Sunday vibes by remembering that I am empowered to make the choice to go to work in the morning, and by making that choice I will own it and be the best version of me that I can be, whether or not it is appreciated by other people.
I am getting out of bed, making an effort to look sort of decent, and doing all the work I need to do, as best as I can.
I can handle whatever the day throws at me.
Everyone is bringing flowers. I don’t have enough vases to put them in. Do they think I’m made of vases? How dare they make me responsible for not allowing another thing to die?
In case anyone wants some perspective on how utterly random triggers can be. I haven’t lived in a house with a garage door in four-ish years. Right now at this moment, I honestly can’t recall what they sound like, except something metallic moving and rather clanky.
There was one on tv. I wasn’t even paying attention to it, I had my headphones on and was actively trying to tune the show out. My ears picked up on the sound of the garage door, and a jolt of adrenaline shot through my body as I grabbed my laptop and moved to get out of my seat and run to my room.
I realized what happened after about two seconds.
The sound is gone from my ears, but my heart is still racing and I’m waiting for the door to the house to open, to hear the jingling of my mother’s keys and her footsteps moving through the house. My muscles are still tense and I’m fighting the urge to run to my room and stick a board in front of the door.
For years, the sound of a garage door was my warning to pack up what I was doing quickly and retreat to my room if I was out of it.
I can’t remember the sound of the garage door right now, but I can’t tell my brain to stop trying to react to it.
This can be reblogged, if anyone was wondering. I wrote up this post with the intention that hopefully people who read it and didn’t really get triggers would understand a bit.
Another thing: my sister was watching a tv show, and an actor with the same voice pitch as my dad’s came onscreen. I heard the voice and froze, choking on my own breath while mentally checking everything on my phone and in my room, making sure that none of my possessions were going to be taken because I had done something “wrong.” My dad was on a business trip in India.
Literally I once almost cried walking into my job at a craft store because they had orange streamers out. It reminded me of Halloween and that holiday has traumatic associations for me. Crying over a streamer seems completely silly without context, but you never really know what it may make another person think about.
I almost burst into tears at work one morning because someone was eating toast and the smell reminded me of being in hospital, where they would always come around and ask us what we wanted for breakfast and we’d have toast. Mine was with strawberry jam. I can’t stomach the thought of strawberry jam now just thinkng about it, but the toast smell trigger doesn’t make much sense because I have eaten it at home plenty of times since being in hospital. Maybe it’s just because it was in a public/unexpected place.
But yes, I have gotten upset over toast. And also the beeping sound a printer was making because it sounded like hospital machinery. I so wanted to go over there and smash the thing to make it stop.
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