All Things Are One

I hate feeling like I’m giving up. I hate feeling defeated by my leukemia. Allowing myself to feel the brunt of the disease feels like I’m giving up. It feels like I’m “getting beat”. It feels like I’m moving backwards. Last week, I was exhausted and could feel myself getting to the end of my rope. I felt like I was supposed to just keeping going. That I just needed to grit my teeth and get through it. These two quotes came to mind:

“The best way out is always through” – attributed to Robert Frost

“When you’re going through hell, keep going” – attributed to Winston Chruchill

Continue reading “The Best Way Out Is In”

I decided to switch things up for this post. My good friend, Brian Perrino, joins me to discuss a book we both recently finished reading called, The Wisdom of No Escape by Pema Chödrön. It’s not a straight book review though, we use it as more of a jumping off point for our discussion. Hope you enjoy!

Continue reading “Book Reflections Podcast – The Wisdom of No Escape”

I was in session with my therapist recently. We were discussing some ways of coping with and handling my disease. All the realizations we were coming to were falling squarely on my shoulders. They were all things that I could change. Some things that I could do differently. Out of frustration I said something along the lines of “why can’t the answer be something else for once?, why does it always have to come back to me?” To which my therapist brilliantly remarked “well, isn’t it better for all the answers to be on you? Because that way you can actually do something about them.”

I sat there dumbfounded for a few seconds, awed by the power of her subtlety. What a complete shift! With just a small tweak in perspective!

After I closed my mouth, an overwhelming feeling started to set in. I thought “I don’t want all that power and responsibility, give it to someone else”. Of course I thought this way. We’re sold this way of thinking every single day. In hindsight, I’m able to see what this really is, an avoidance maneuver. One that we’re all accustomed to. We tend to seek external sources of potential blame as a deflection method.

Continue reading “Blame Game, Lame Game”

We need hope. We need to believe that the world will improve. We need to believe that things will get better. Hope motivates us to be the best versions of ourselves. It comforts us during tough times. It sheds light when things seem dark. Hope is generally accepted as one of, if not the most, positive forces we possess.

However, we live in a dualistic world, where there are two sides to everything. James Clear wrote an article called, The Shadow Side of Greatness, where he cautions that:

“Success in one area is often tied to failure in another area, especially at the extreme end of performance. The more extreme the greatness, the longer the shadow it casts.”

This “shadow side” concept is not just applicable to performance and success, but to all things, internal and external. Which brings me back to hope. Writing about the “shadow side” of hope makes me feel wrong, it makes me feel dirty. This repulsive avoidance is confirmation that I’m headed in the right direction.

Continue reading “Hope’s Masquerade”

For all of our lives we’ve been trained to provide an answer when a question is asked of us. Our minds subconsciously manufacture certainty, fearing the unknown more than the known. We operate under a facade of certainty because uncertainty makes us squirm. But, if we’re being honest, nothing in life is certain, we just like to pretend it is.

Having a chronic disease has shattered this illusion of certainty a bit and led to a lot of squirming on my part. “How am I going to feel tomorrow?”, “what if this is forever?”, “am I going to be on this medication for the rest of my life?”, “isn’t there something I can do to make this better?”. I just need to work harder to find the answers, because they have to be out there… right? And not having the answer means I’m somehow deficient…. right?

Continue reading “Where Ya Headed?”

A year ago today, I was diagnosed with cancer. I remember that day so vividly. Yet it simultaneously was such a blur. It feels like I’ve had this disease forever and it also feels like I was diagnosed just yesterday. Time is a fickle friend.

My doctor called the morning of March 8th 2018 and told me that he wanted to admit me to the hospital, just to run some tests. I left work in tears and listened to Drake’s song, God’s Plan, on repeat on my drive home. It seemed fitting. My mom and I arrived at the hospital and were directed to a room on the 6th floor of Jersey Shore Hospital.

I made small talk with the nurse who brought us to the room. We chatted sports, mostly Giants football. As we were settling in he got a call to go to another room and said “I can’t I’m with a leukemia patient right now”. When he got off the phone I said “I don’t have leukemia, I’m just here to get some tests done”, he just smiled and patted my arm before walking out the door.

Continue reading “My First Cancerversary”