A friend from work wrote to me.

It’s hard for people not to dance nervously around your shit at work, like if you’ve gotten run over by a car or half your face has been removed for skin cancer or whatever. There’s the loooong ‘pretend not to see it’ phase, followed by the ‘things will get better so buck up’ phase, and finally the ironic/grumpy ‘sorry your life sucks’ phase where the shut-ins and other “fuck this” types stake their positions. Thank god I seem be moving into that last stage, because if one more well meaning idiot said “you’re still good looking” (“still”, ugh) you were gonna hear a news story about my aim from a watchtower.

So this friend wrote to say: When I got divorced, because the man I loved had this big affair with someone who looked just like me (but not as ‘difficult’ in personality apparently), he left me the same week as I was diagnosed with stage III ovarian cancer.

This wasn’t a “it could be worse” story—the point was that she was sick, and that fact so trumped the other problem that she hardly even thought about the other. She turned inward and focused on being okay again. By the time that was over, she thought “huh, I’ve been divorced a year.” She thought that was a good metaphor for how external pain should be handled by an inward turn, where the pain is actually located. The trick, she went on to say, is to do that before you get sick and before “parts of you have to be lopped off or out.”

A lot of people have given me a lot of advice this year, and actually I’ve only heard bits and pieces of it as I’ve rolled by, thump-ouch-thump down the Big Hill. But this one stopped me. And I thought I’ll buy a feng shui book to keep me company this winter, and quietly arrange every corner and color for wellbeing, and sink into solitude as into warm water.

frou frou - let go