Tag: self identity

The Changing Self

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All year I’d been doing well with posting weekly, then came this cancer thing. It’s been just over two months since my mastectomy and nearly a month since my last post. I’m now entering what is called the “survivorship phase.” It’s a sort of silly title to me. I’m still waiting for it all to become real in my mind. How can you be surviving something that doesn’t seem quite real?

I thought I was really rocking it, doing great when I walked along with my dog walkers starting the day after I came home from the hospital, did my first post-surgery 5k (at a walking pace) just two weeks later, and started to run again shortly after.

Then I had my first seizure in about four months (a long time for me) and another a few weeks later, started to have major fatigue that left me so exhausted that I could barely walk to the bus stop much less run a mile or more, along with all this I got a bakers cyst in my knee that left me limping and occassionally sent me a shot of pain if I bent wrong or got bumped by one of the toddlers that I work with. Then a dear friend and fellow activist, David Cobb, died.

I’d not seen David in several years. I live in the Midwest and he lived on the West Coast. His passing hit me hard. He’d given so much to the movement, took on so much, did such amazing work. He wasn’t the first fellow activist I’d known who’d died far too young. All held some things in common. They’d pushed too hard, giving their all to making the world a better place. They’d changed the world at the cost of themselves. They were seen by others as strong and sometimes larger than life.

I can see it in myself. I walked a 5k two weeks after surgery. I agreed to sit on the board of WORT 89.9fm just a few weeks before my surgery and, in fact, agreed to be vice-president and to chair the policies and bylaws committee along with being part of the personnel committee and taking on a variety of “fix-it” projects for the station as I began my cancer journey. All of this while going back to work full-time with toddlers! I recognize the need in myself to be strong, to create positive change, to be an activist and leader.

There’s my challenge. My body is saying no. My body is asking, in fact pleading with me, to redefine myself. It is hard for my mind, heart, and maybe even soul to do. Who am I now? How do I create good in the world without destroying myself? I suppose it’s a question that many of us ask ourselves at different points in our lives. For now the answers lead me to writing my blog and rocking babies and letting go of big pieces of my activist life. I was both saddened, relieved, and a bit guilt stricken to leave the WORT 89.9fm board when I realized the impacts it was having on my body. I was, and sometimes still am, angry with myself for not being able to do it all anymore. Still, I am thankful and proud to recognize this in myself before it’s too late too. Becoming a new self is a complicated journey. I welcome your insights on how you are redeveloping yourselves and how this process has helped you become the you for this time in life.

Learning When School Is Closed

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So, the schools are closed. For some this is a challenge and it might even mean that learning is lost. For others I suspect it could the best thing that’s happened in 500 years.

I was just thinking this morning about some of my Native friends whose kids and grandkids aren’t in school right now, thinking about where those kids are instead. I realized they’re out at the sugarbush. They’re helping cook food for the family. They’re listening to their grandpa tell stories. Heck, some are even talking with their moms in their Native languages. It made me wonder what will happen to these children?

For over a hundred years Native children were stolen from their families and placed in boarding schools where their language, culture, and traditions were forcibly taken from them. When the boarding school era was winding down the federal government tried another tactic, taking funding from tribes and, in some cases, revoking the recognition of tribes making it impossible to maintain schools equal to that of predominately white areas. Yet, somehow the people survived. A great deal was lost, but much was retained.

If cultures can survive when children are torn away for generations and kept by their captors, what might happen if children can be held close and held with love and told the stories by their families? I can only hope that this illness that has struck the world might help us find the medicine we need.

I suspect the same is true regardless of who we are, Native or non-Native. Our children grow strong when they know their history, when they know who they are. Tell them the stories. Show them the way. The time out of school may be the best time to learn.