on writing, fear, and heavy lifting

Since meeting with Jess, “my editor,” in Oakland last week, I have been feeling lots of urges to write, without finding a lot of time in my schedule to do so. Jess had read through all my blog postings at least once, and given me global comments, as well as working through the first few months of entries in more detail with detailed comments. We talked about what the deeper themes of the hypothetical book could be, and how I might structure it, and how I might structure my time to make room for writing it. And, how we might use visual processes to sort out the organization of the book, using sticky-notes in person or a mind-mapping equivalent online.

I left the two-hour-plus meeting feeling a bit daunted – writing a book that encompasses more than just my experience with breast cancer treatment last year seems to be what draws me; a deeper look at fear, and the desire to live fully, and how the two have operated throughout my life. I was, and am, excited by the prospect, but also a bit overwhelmed by the magnitude of it. This doesn’t just mean revising some blog entries and piecing it together. There is so much more to write about.

Jess had asked me to consider writing more about “Becca’s relationship to fear before cancer.” (There is a convention when working on a memoir to refer to the self one is writing about in the third person when discussing the work with editors and critical readers, in order to distinguish the self-in-the-past-being-written-about from the self-in-the-present-doing-the-writing. This is supposed to be helpful because it lends a bit of distance, and also because it encourages you to think in terms of a character in a story, which can help you imagine it from the readers’ perspective and make it compelling).

Becca’s relationship to fear before cancer? At first, as I attempted to respond to her written comments before our meeting, I drew sort of a blank. A telling blank: because, truth be told, I grew up believing, at least on the surface, that there was nothing to fear but fear itself. What was Becca afraid of before cancer? My initial list was very short:

Dogs (ages 3-6 or so)

Bees (ages 8 to 15 or so)

Nuclear Holocaust (teen through late 20s)

As I drove away from our in-depth conversation, I noticed a few more things to add to my list, and stole a few moments while waiting for Don and Sam at the airport to jot a few notes:

Fear of car crashes! How my mom used to worry about this whenever someone was late, and how I have the same worries now. How, her fearfulness as a driver, and my dad’s seeming fearlessness, and his judgment of her fearfulness, set me up to try to be like him instead of her, and to fear, more than anything, being fearful, and being judged for it. I’ve worked on this in therapy and co-counseling for years, and the past few years, as I’ve been more mindful, I've been increasingly aware of the quiet frisson of fear shivering up my throat as I pass an intersection and unwillingly imagine someone plowing through the red light into my vehicle. As I drive from Jess’s house to pick Don and Sam up at the San Francisco airport, I wonder, how to be just afraid enough to be alert while driving, without being tense? How to live not in fear, but in love of life?

The next day, a huge barrage of ideas came crashing in, and I want to write about all of them at once!! My list of what did Becca fear before cancer now includes:

Fear of being wrong

Fear of my death or illness being my own fault

Fear of failure (with sub-categories: fear of unwanted pregnancy; fear of failure as an activist)

Fear of ridicule (bad dreams about nakedness)

Fear of getting hurt

Fear of surviving a nuclear holocaust

Fear of swinging too high in a swing

Fear of hurting others

Fear of getting struck by lightening while swimming in the lake (which I’ve blogged about already)

Fear of Nazis, fear of Arabs – collective fears of the Jewish people

Fear of gangsters

Fear of rape

Fear of gambling

Fear of being out of control, losing control

Fear of loud noises

Fear of environmental destruction, climate change

And for most of these, I can already think of a story from my life that goes with them!

I’m also having lots of experiences where I notice something, and then notice my noticing it, then notice a whole cascade of memories, associations, and stories I might weave into a blog post, essay, or a book.

For instance, the other day I rode my bike past the community gardens in Brittingham Park, and noticed the rectangles of wire fencing still lying stacked on the ground, ready to join their comrades marching around the perimeter to create a barrier against stray toddlers and Frisbee-catchers. I imagined trying to lift one of them off the metal stakes that pinned the stack to the ground. At least two people, I mused as I biked past, would be needed to make the job easy, and in noticing that thought, I also noticed the memories of other collective work projects coursing through my mind and making up the grounding for that assessment: The women’s yurt-building project at East Wind Community, with its giddy sense of mutual empowerment as we learned to use power tools and apply our 8th grade trigonometry; my one and only foray into brick-laying, working with Laird at Sandhill Farm on the inner walls of the new septic tank for Karma (a building so-named because it had taken many, many years to build by the residents, with considerable interpersonal conflict along the way, much of it before my time there).

During that project I came to have a deep appreciation for the strength and skill involved in brick-laying, struggling as I did with it; so challenging to lay them straight and even, with Laird pointing out how each tiny deviation from perfect alignment can combine with the ones before and after to make a crooked and unstable wall; and each brick feeling heavier than the one before in my small hands unaccustomed to such labor; and all the time trying to prove myself up to the task.

And then came the heaviest lift I ever made: After the concrete lid to the septic tank was cured, hoisting it up and walking it over to place it onto the tank. I was afraid I’d seriously injured my back on that one, but couldn’t find it in me to say “no, it’s too heavy,” as everyone we had on hand was lifting it together. Does all collective labor have these pros and cons? More hands making the work lighter physically, yet the fear of being judged or letting down one’s comrades making it feel heavy, and perhaps even dangerous, when we can’t find our own voice?

Well, speaking of finding voice, it seems imperative that I make time for at least some more of this writing, somehow. While it is a solitary endeavor in many ways, I do feel you my readers here with me, and though I occasionally fear judgment, for the most part it is a helpful sense of collective attention, and exploration together of how to live fully in the face of our fears and our frailty.