Almost forty years ago, I moved from my hometown in Waterford, Michigan, to Charlottesville, Virginia, to pursue a Master of Education degree in Secondary English Education. The underlying reasons for the move at that time were twofold. After two years of working a job to pay student loans while writing fiction in my “spare time,” I realized I needed a better fit for my day job. I had already received a Master in Writing from a reputable university, but I found that my job in a stock brokerage office took me further away from my goal of writing. If I pursued the education degree, which contained within in it a teacher certification piece, something I’d neglected to pursue with my undergraduate degree in English, I might find that magical day job; I’d always enjoyed teaching.

My other reason for the move involved the location and my relationship to the man who eventually became my husband. I wanted for the two of us to live in the same city in separate lodgings to see if we had the kind of compatibility that a marriage would require. We would both be in graduate school at the same time, though he had a head start, having moved to study at the University of Virginia a year earlier.

During my first semester in my program, I fell in love with my course in Adolescent Literature. One of the course requirements was to read a certain number of books and journal about them. I can’t recall the number – fifteen or twenty. We could read anything we wanted, if the book could be deemed appropriately as appealing to young adults. For one of my selections, I chose Carson McCullers’ A Member of the Wedding – I’d had exposure to some of her short stories in high school. I remember reading the novel in my bedroom apartment on Stribling Avenue in Charlottesville, trying to get a feel for the adolescent main character, fascinated by how the novel evolved. The novel was set in the South, and I was living in the South for the first time, looking out my apartment window at the lush foliage.

The experience of reading that McCullers’ novel reminded me of how I’d loved a short story of hers at some point earlier in my life. In “A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud.,” an adolescent paper boy meets a man in a streetcar café one day, a man who is trying to recover from his past, having lost a woman whom he’d cared about deeply. The patrons of the café and the owner himself view the man as a potential “drunk” or someone suffering from an instability. Shortly after the paper boy enters, the man tells him that he loves him and explains that he is learning to love the world one item or person at a time. Perhaps if he practices that act, he can learn to live and love again.

The tone in the story is not unlike that in Hemingway’s often anthologized story, “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.” Both McCullers and Hemingway write about people searching for explanations, people who want answers. They want to know how to exist in the world with purpose; sometimes they want to understand how their lives turned out the way they did.

I’ve gleaned from what I’ve read in the intervening years that Carson McCullers’ life was challenging at times. While readers, critics, and other authors praised her writing and considered her a truly gifted writer when her work emerged, her friendships, while rewarding, were complicated. She married a man, struggled with the marriage, which ended in divorce, and later remarried the man, who committed suicide some years later. She had lesbian lovers as well, though she reportedly never embraced her identity as a lesbian, even though she wrote honestly about the complications of sexual orientation. She suffered from rheumatic fever early in life and later died young because of the lingering effects of the resulting rheumatic heart disease.

Thus, it seems clear that McCullers knew, experienced, and sometimes even embraced the complications and complexities of life.

I still hold on tightly to what I learned from “A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud.” I’ve applied the knowledge I gained from that reading experience to my life with stage IV lung cancer for over nine years. There are complications and complexities in my life. Deteriorations. When cancer is not in remission but dwelling in an odd sort of abeyance, a hidden suspended animation, there are breakthrough events requiring treatments, in addition to the daily dose of the oral targeted therapy drug I take each day. You live your life in as normal a way as possible, with infirmities. You deal with COVID-19, adjusting as well as possible to the reality of the mounting deaths.

Yet it’s hard to make plans for the future. For me, it’s hard, during any given year or on any given day, to determine whether I’m actively living or dying. That’s why I latch onto the serious mission of the struggling man in “A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud.” and the process he outlines. There is a simplicity to the approach, a mindfulness. Focusing on the trill of a nearby bird or the shadow of the sunset on a patch of carpet and embracing such things can be soothing to a person living with a chronic, terminal disease.

If we take the wisdom from that story and marry it to what we know about the mindfulness process – valuing the moment, valuing the in-and-out breath of the moment, settling the anxiety by embracing small things and breathing in and out as we embrace them, holding on and loving that thing we embrace – we can find a bit of joy and simultaneously dispel some of the gloom.

A little over a month ago, I went to the desert in California with my husband. He had a business trip for work. I had the option of staying home or going with him. Staying home meant caring for the dog and dealing with potential snowfall and ice, activities I wasn’t sure my body could tackle. Going with him meant braving airplane travel with a mask and being exposed to more people in a week than I see in two or three months.

The visit wasn’t perfect. It was colder than I realized it would be in the desert, and I just couldn’t get warm. My body felt out of sorts, out of its rhythm. Just before I returned home, I lost my phone, which caused headaches just as the trip concluded. But I saw an old writing friend. We talked about books and movies and walked along a beach to the changing colors of a sunset. The visit was a luxurious gift for someone like me who wants to say good-bye to people I’ve loved, not too soon, but somewhere close to the end, whenever that might be.

Despite my weariness, I found a bit of rebirth. I found things to embrace — metaphorically. A Joshua Tree. The San Jacinto Mountains. A cactus. The trip provided a respite.

Yet shortly after I returned home, Russia invaded Ukraine. I weep now for the people who must deal with this ongoing tragedy and for the people who’ve already been lost. And I’m faced again with a common dilemma, one so many of us face. How do we reconcile the dissonance we find when we try to focus on moments of beauty and stillness, questing for inner peace, while acknowledging widespread pain and suffering, whether in a war-torn country or any other place of sadness in the external world? We dealt with the harsh realities of COVID-19; we’ve known atrocities in the past. Those atrocities don’t go away, even if you try to ignore or bury them.

I don’t want to live in a bubble; I want to extend my empathy and fight complacency, but I don’t know how to salve my soul as well.

I don’t have any easy answers. I will continue to search for a balanced and safe state of mind. Like the man in McCullers’ story, like McCullers herself, I will try to love small delights and moments and celebrate their beauty. And if only in my heart, I will try to take the radiant light those things produce and bend it toward Ukraine.

This past autumn, around September, Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel started singing in my ear:

Slow down, you move too fast

You got to make the morning last

I’m hoping that as you read these words, the melody plays in your head. If you like, try to keep it going as you read. I’ve written before in this blog about the speed of life and my increasingly slower pace as a cancer patient. All around me, events swirl at a breakneck speed, like an accelerated clip from an old movie. In the past, I’ve often viewed this slowing down as a necessary step, imposed on me by my life with cancer. But I’m beginning to recognize that slowing down may be a choice, a preferred way of being in this world that is accelerating, becoming more frantic and louder with its sounds of dissonance.

We’ve just lived through two years of a pandemic. In the final month of 2021, “Omicron” made it into our vocabularies in bold and noxious fashion. In the political realm, pundits and politicians alike daily question what we as individuals and as a united nation believe about the democracy that governs us. I have three children in their twenties and early thirties who tell me that they have serious concerns about what their futures will hold.

In December, I “celebrated” nine years of being on a daily oral cancer drug for my stage IV lung cancer. Yes, I’m happy to be alive (“Stay Positive; Stay Grateful” being the mantra most cancer patients are urged to repeat to themselves), but I’m falling behind. After nine years of dealing with the disease itself and the side effects of the drug I take to keep the cancer in check – a drug which fights the cancer but does not offer remission and simultaneously attacks my skin, my eyeballs, my brain, and my psyche – I want to be that stubborn child who digs in her heels and cries, “No! Stop!” In truth, I’m losing the ability to keep pace with the world. But observing the day-to-day turmoil in our society, our country, and our world, I question daily whether I want to continue to do so.

One can argue that the advent of COVID-19 offered the world a chance to slow down, and like many others, I’m honored to have observed so much goodness in people who performed from balconies, cheered health care workers, and extended humanity to others around them. But we also know that anxiety levels have increased over the past few years; those increased levels have contributed to hyper-charged social media posts, assuming social media posts weren’t already on steroids before the pandemic.

This combined speed and frenzy is not what I want for my life. I didn’t drag myself through the last nine years with cancer to experience what feels like the world yelling in my face to speed up. I need to retreat.

For most of my life, I’ve done what people asked me to do, without complaining too much. As a cancer patient, I’ve followed all the rules, and I continue to go through the paces, but it’s getting harder. To make and keep doctor appointments, to wait at the end of a cell phone line to get through to the human voice to order the prescription or the CT scan. No one told me I’d have to do this long, slow, living-with-cancer, dying-from-cancer dance during COVID, without a solid job, while still trying to help my children launch themselves into adulthood.

And there’s the rub. I’ve realized that as a cancer patient who needs to slow down, who wants desperately to take the meandering stroll (with walking stick), sing the slow songs, enjoy the increasingly rare deep breaths, I worry about leaving my children in this world of craziness. I want to sugar-coat their beings with the words of encouragement I won’t be able to speak to them when I’m gone.

I worry that if I don’t slow down, I’ll work myself into a frenzy about scheduling medical appointments, staring at my cell phone screen while I’m on hold and the minutes tick by, becoming a wound-up, tangled ball of self-absorption who can’t see beyond herself, her needs. I worry that I’ll lose my capacity for an external focus and instead dwell within my disability.

Yet how will I help my children if I don’t stay in the game? If I don’t keep learning the technology and maintaining the persistence to make the appointments and take the medicines? How can I slow down and still help them learn to live without me once I’m gone?

Paul Simon has said that he was just learning how to deal with the fame of the “Bridge Over Troubled Water” success when he wrote “The 59^th Street Bridge Song,” while travelling across that New York landmark, a bridge where traffic moves quickly, and drivers need to hear a message to slow down and stay safe.

As I examine the song’s lyrics, especially, “I’m dappled and drowsy and ready to sleep,” the words capture what I want for my slower life. “Dappled” suggests a slow, meandering pattern of light playing over color. “Drowsy” refers to that lovely pre-sleeping state where the body slows down and starts its even breathing – ready to sleep. Ready to succumb to the peaceful moment, half-conscious. And yes, I want to make the morning last, too. Carpe diem and all that, not in an urgent way but in a remembering, appreciative way.

I honestly don’t know how I’ll resolve the tension between slowing down and trying to stay aware of the world just enough to support my children as they deal with their futures. Perhaps for now, the best I can do is seize my good days and search for those small moments that offer luminescence. Seek out the dapples and share them.

My apologies. I haven’t written a blog post in a while. The fall of 2019 brought many good things into my life – the publication of a full-length book, Winded: A Memoir in Four Stages, and a launch party to celebrate my 60^th birthday and my seventh cancer birthday with a stage four lung cancer diagnosis.

Yet in close proximity to those positive events, I had to deal with new findings from CT scans on the small, inconclusive, but clearly growing spots on my lungs. Repeated scans revealed increases in those small spots. The fall of 2019 with its powerful and positive events brought me some revitalization, yet as 2020 dawned, I lost ground – more fatigue and increased mysterious twinges in my lungs and bones.

All terminal cancer patients who enjoy “more time” know the duality of these kinds of twinges. They could mean nothing. Or they could point to the beginning of the end.

And then there was COVID-19. With seven years of survival under my belt, I know well how guilt, an insidious infusion in a survivor’s veins, can make the heart and body quake with the recognition of unfairness. COVID-19 plays a diametric role in a cancer patient’s life. At the basic level of survival, it can transform a relatively normal person into the hermit of hermits. How likely is it that a stage IV lung patient would survive COVID-19? But the psychological and emotional effects become even more twisted as a cancer patient watches others die of COVID-19, with little notice and considerable suffering. “That should have been me,” she says. “At least I’ve been able to prepare a bit. I’ve had ‘more time,’ as the commercials say.”

After a final, mid-year scan in 2020, during the summer’s brief pause in the pandemic, my oncologist and I were able to negotiate a new treatment plan. I would go off my daily oral pill of Tarceva, the miracle drug for my particular mutation, and begin taking a new oral medicine approved in recent years, Tagrisso. Tagrisso, also known as osimertinib, and created by AstraZeneca,

Would it do the same for me? After nearly eight years on another drug, I was a statistical outlier Could that happen twice? What were the chances? It would not be fair. I knew three women with my kind of cancer who had found hope in the narrative of my extended life on a miracle drug yet failed to receive the same benefit.

On November 7, 2020, three months after I started taking Tagrisso, I travelled to two Henry Ford facilities for tests. After getting labs and scans at the hospital, I drove to the office building where my oncologist saw suburban patients one day a week.

I had suspicions about how my body was reacting to the new drug. I felt cautiously optimistic that I might be experiencing an upsurge in energy. The side effects of the medication were far less drastic than those I’d experienced in the almost eight years I’d taken Tarceva.

My oncologist asked, when he entered the room, if I was nervous about the results, and I told him that I thought I knew what they might be. He confirmed that the spots were shrinking. Significantly. And the pleural effusion that had begun to grow again in my lungs was once more receding.

Good news. Something to celebrate. Yet throughout the day, I’d been thinking about the card I needed to write to the husband of the woman who had died that previous year, shortly before my book launch and 60^th birthday party.

How do I celebrate my good news? My minor triumph?

Here are the facts:

• I was diagnosed with cancer in November 2012, just before my 53^rd birthday.
• After being a writer and creating manuscripts for my entire adult life, I was awarded with book publication at the age of 60.
• I also began my second reprieve from cancer, a second regeneration, at the age of 60.
• In May of 2021, at the age of 61, I will publish a second book, the novel that I began writing thirty years ago.

It is all good news.

It is also not fair. Nor is it a miracle. I assert to you most pointedly but humbly: Life is not fair.

Yet I am trying to grow from that little girl who found it hard, for so many years, to take a compliment. I must take this good news and allow it to be a humble little light, not unlike the flame of a candle one has just ignited, trying to gain purchase on the wick.

I am cupping for a moment that small flame and its wick.

It’s a quiet whisper: Good News.

(Photo of Glenoory Bay, Donegal, courtesy of Alison Hirschel and Gene Burns)

In one of my last posts, I talked about being a tortoise rather than a cheetah.  I recently saw a friend and roommate from college, Marilyn Beals, and she reminded me that I am a cheetah when I eat – at least I was in college – but that may be because she is a tortoise when she eats!  She wanted to affirm for me that I can still do some things quickly.

For months now, I’ve been thinking of a William Wordsworth sonnet, “The World is Too Much with Us,” which is a poetic companion of sorts to my cheetah vs. tortoise post. Although I was trained as a fiction writer, I have read and taught enough poetry over the years that lines from poems often come to my brain unbidden, which happens, I think, when you love words, and also when you share/teach the same poem to four sections of literature-based composition on any given day, as I did in the 1980s at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia.

At some point I must have committed the sonnet to memory, because different lines come to me at different times. Wordsworth was an English Romantic poet, and the poem is often described as asserting his frustration with the Industrial Revolution and the way in which it moved humanity away from nature, robbing the human spirit of mystery, beauty, and the capacity for wonder. His message certainly resonates in our current era as well, even though we long ago moved past the Industrial Revolution and into the Information Revolution.

Wordsworth’s message also resonates for me on a slightly different plane. As I have intoned “The World is Too Much with Us” to myself in the last few years, what I’m positing is that I have become too slow for the world. Because of the speed of everyday life and my slow pace, I can’t keep up. We are out of step, the world and I.

Yet I am not alone, and recent events have underscored this point for me.

The dissonance and the space between my speed and the speed of the world is no more evident than when I am traveling and must manage the GPS system on my phone while driving. I expect the navigational guide to reign on the screen; when a random text or email message interrupts the navigation depicted on my phone, my blood pressure rises, and I panic. If I lose my navigational screen, I will be lost. None of the paper maps on the seat next to me will do any good after dusk has arrived and I ‘m in the middle lane of some six-lane expressway. My hands grip the steering wheel; my neck moves as if on a hinge, snapping right, then left to check the lanes around me. “The world is too much with us,” I mumble to myself, and what I means is that I am frightened at how old I have suddenly become, how inept I feel in this world that moves at a pace even my adolescent self could never have managed.

I wrote the paragraph above several weeks before I learned of the sudden death of one of my daughter’s high schoolclassmates.  He was driving with two friends on a rock-climbing adventure in a western state, just a few weeks before he was to be married.  In the afternoon on a precipitation-free day, a car drifted from its lane on a two-lane road and hit his vehicle head on.  He was killed instantly. One of his passengers died just over a week later.

In the media report, the law enforcement officials suggest that some driver inattention on the part of the other driver might have been involved.  That driver was also hospitalized.

Driver inattention.  That two-word phrase could mean so many things.  It could mean that the driver, like me, has difficulty trying to follow the GPS on her phone to determine her travel path.  It could mean that she was texting while driving.  It could mean that she has undiagnosed narcolepsy. It could mean that she was under the influence of alcohol or some controlled substance. There are a host of possibilities for that two-word phrase “driver inattention,” but in the end, none of it really matters because so many people’s lives have been irrevocably changed by the consequences of the driver inattention, regardless of the specific kind of inattention.

A much more mundane example of how the world is too much with us is apparent in the recent presidential debates for the Democratic candidates. While these debates are arguably no different than those in the last half century, the number of candidates make the compressed intensity of the debate style more apparent. In order to narrow the field, the candidates must “take on” each other with respect to key issues.  Each candidate’s team members perform research and develop talking points based on opponents’ past policy decisions.  The television viewers watch to see which candidate gets to have a “moment” in the limelight, based on his or her delivery of a one-liner or zinger.

Seriously?

Let me make a pointed statement. I will vote for any candidate who is not Donald Trump.  But the media runs the risk of turning all of these candidates into miniature Trumps with its focus on minute- and seconds-long answers.  Whether a candidate is talking about his, her, or their policies, plans, platforms, or values, a tweet-sized thought is not substantial enough.  Candidates deserve the opportunity to articulate their ideas.  There are so many of us who just can’t live any longer in this sound-bite world that Trump has harnessed for his reign.

And finally, the obvious example of the “too much with us” world. Wordsworth is mourning the loss of the natural world: “Little we see in Nature that is ours,” he says.

The ice in Greenland is melting.  The temperatures in Europe and elsewhere have soared.  Trash floats in and chokes the earth’s bodies of water.  Every night, a different expert on a different news show explains to us that we have only ten years to alter the path that leads to the earth’s destruction.

At times, over the years, I have stopped in my tracks, often in a quiet room, and intoned Wordsworth’s words: “Great God! I’d rather be/A pagan suckled in a creed outworn….”

A pagan.  For Wordsworth, the idea is radical, his “Great God!” serving not only as an exhortation but also as an exclamation.

Regardless of what creeds we follow, we must slow down. A slower pace is imperative.

When we are driving.  When we are speaking and even arguing with others.  We must embrace the quiet in the world and linger much longer in some silent, natural moments. We must turn to others, speaking gently and with humility.  We must extend our empathy.  Above all else, empathy, respecting the dignity of others.  The dignity of humanity.

 

The World is Too Much with Us

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.—Great God! I’d rather be
A pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

William Wordsworth

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For the most part, I am doing well these days, arguably feeling the best I’ve felt in nearly seven years with stage IV lung cancer.

Nearly seven years. And yes, my survivor’s guilt has grown considerably with each year. I wish every terminal cancer patient could have nearly seven more years.

My book Winded: A Memoir in Four Stages comes out in the fall, fulfilling the writing and publishing dream of my lifetime. I will spend twelve days with my family in Ireland in August, something I never thought possible back in 2012, when I was diagnosed.

Perhaps most exciting of all, for the first time in all of these years, I have earned permission to skip the quarterly scans and appointment I usually have with my oncologist, which means I have permission to enjoy my book launch without having the specter of bad scans — six months instead of the usual three months, and I will take that anxiety that usually builds for those three months and spread it in a thin layer over the six months as if it were a lite anxiety sandwich, so much easier to chew and swallow than the regular version.

The scans that preceded my oncologist’s permission were fabulous in their “unremarkable-ness,” unremarkable being the word that pops up frequently in radiology reports when things are going well in one’s body. Unbelievably unremarkable, and to be honest, completely unexpected. Since I required stereotactic body radiation in February of 2018 for what appeared to be a growing spot on my left lung, I was pretty sure I was on my way out of the universe; I had appreciated my five years beyond diagnosis, and it didn’t seem fair that I should have more than that. People on my drug who make it past the two-year mark often start to succumb somewhere between the five- and seven-year mark. I didn’t want to be greedy.

Yet the latest scans revealed that every spot in my lungs appears to be stable. Nearly every lab result for my blood tests falls within the normal range.

In the previous six weeks, I’d even had success with a new antibiotic to treat the daily cancer drug’s rash on my face, and for the first time in six years, my face, especially my eyebrows, revealed no external signs of the dreaded Tarceva rash. For years I’ve lived with the unpredictable pimples and the ubiquitous Frankenbrow that has transformed the follicles of hair above my eyeglass frames into two inflamed and ragged patches of hair-peppered angry skin.

In the meantime, wearing a relatively rash-free face with which to greet the world, I attended a lovely writing retreat at Interlochen, enjoying writing sessions, craft talks, and readings. I hadn’t been to the workshop in a few years, but the previous time I’d attended, I came home rejuvenated and full of energy.

This time, when I returned home, I hit a wall.

I hit a wall just like one of those cartoon characters who thwacks into a solid surface and bounces away, a goose-egg knot emerging on her forehead. I experienced the exhaustion that I’ve felt on and off over the years, the kind of exhaustion you can’t sleep through, can only roam the rooms of your house and try to shake off, like you try to shake the cobwebs in your brain each day.

I knew that the rash would come back when I cycled off the antibiotic. My new dermatologist had told me so. I used to take a different drug continuously with no breaks. I’d stopped this new drug just as I’d headed to Interlochen.

I didn’t know the rash would return with such a vengeance after I returned home. For the first time in years, I’d felt that the face I presented to the world was almost normal.

But it wasn’t just the rash that frustrated me.

Call me the naïve puppy who refuses to learn the lesson her owner is trying to teach her, keeps antagonizing the tenured family cat, keeps dragging that one kid’s favorite t-shirt out from under the bed to chew on, keeps finding ways to creep into that patch of wildflowers entwined with poison ivy.

I know better than most that the rash always returns if the drug is working. I’ve known also throughout this journey that the fatigue can be relentless at times, stemming from a combination of the Tarceva drug’s side effects, fibromyalgia, depression, and poor sleep.

I solved the sleep issue for several years by taking a sleeping pill, which seemed to provide at least nine good hours of sleep each night. But I hated the fog that sometimes resulted from the drug, and I worried that I suffered from short-term memory loss. Thus, I gave it up, making myself return to plain, unadulterated sleep. Which means that on some nights I am wide awake and move to another bedroom to do Sudoku, my strategy for emptying my brain of unwanted distractions and perseverative thoughts.

Perhaps my good fortune in the last year – my book’s publication, my recent stable scan and blood results – caused me to temporarily forget about the fatigue that has troubled me throughout my cancer journey. It’s a strange fatigue, because it isn’t relieved by naps; I used to be a religious napper before I was diagnosed with cancer. But somewhere along the way I lost the capacity for long two- or three-hour naps on weekend afternoons. My mind doesn’t often let me shut down in that way anymore.

And I suspect that one of the ways in which I’ve tried to outwit the fatigue is by simply ignoring it, charging through days, making myself do, do, and do. Yet I know that when I do anything in a public setting, I lose energy. I love people, but as an introvert, I lose energy when I am around people. It should have been no surprise to me then that while being at Interlochen for four days added fuel to my emotional and intellectual reservoir, it depleted my energy.

Still, I felt such sadness when I hit that wall and knew I would have to pull out of the universe once again and sit. Just sit.

And remind myself that I am a tortoise. That’s the other thing I keep forgetting. Not only do I deal with fatigue and exhaustion; I am also slow.

It’s not clear whether I’ve always been slow. As a kid who suffered from chronic and often acute asthma, I knew that I was slow at all things physical. Before I was given an exemption for gym class, I was the slowest runner and could never haul myself up that rope to touch the beam at the top of the gym ceiling.

But I also had early indications that while my body was slow, my mind was fast. I was a fast reader. I did math problems quickly. I remembered things faster and more accurately than many of my peers.

In my mid-forties, I began to have some indication of how my tortoise tendencies might affect my mental capacities as well as my physical ones. One summer I did test scoring for Pearson, the educational company with a finger in nearly every education pie in the country. Math tests. That summer I sat in my grading pod in front of a computer screen, grading for hours on end, quick numerical assessments of how a student solved a math problem, often related to a graph or a geometrical figure. From time to time, the pods would be assessed as to their members’ skills at grading. I scored high on accuracy. When I was normed against others, it was clear that I viewed the test answers in the same way as countless other graders did.

However, when I learned my efficiency score, I was mortified. I graded exams much more slowly than other graders. I made up for my deficits in efficiency with my accuracy, but it was clear that I was not a rock star in my grading of exams when it came to speed.

What I learned that summer about accuracy versus efficiency as it applied to my brain helped me to understand, in some fledgling way, why I could not grade student papers quickly or efficiently. Friends and colleagues gave me a bit of a pass – “But you’re so thoughtful,” they would say. “So conscientious.”

I could tell myself that, and I’d like to believe that some of that “excuse” was true. But I also believe that my brain simply took longer to go through a series of steps that involved complex skills: reading what was on the page before me, summarizing what I thought the students were getting at, analyzing how they might improve their manner of articulating their thoughts or their manner of supporting their ideas, and finally, communicating my observations to them in a concise but articulate way. Putting a grade on their efforts. (That last step for me was its own quagmire, triggering a myriad of concerns about how I might damage some student’s self-esteem or tip a depressed student’s mood into dangerous emotional territory).

When I finally let go of my teaching responsibilities, I didn’t have to think so much any more about why I was such a tortoise. At least when it came to reading, commenting on, and grading papers.

But the cancer diagnosis requires me to keep that tortoise aspect of my brain’s functioning in mind. This weekend, while writing long overdue thank you notes to friends, I wrote that I was “living like a tortoise in a cheetah world.”

A comparison between the tortoise and the hare might have been more apt, as Aesop already established it in our literary canon. Plus, there are lots of rabbits – hares – that wander through my back yard. But today’s world really is a cheetah world. The cheetah runs fast and sleek, its claws digging into the earth to give it balance. In my yoga class, our instructor Marie gives us metaphors to help us think about what to do with our bodies. I hear her say “Plant yourself! Spread those toes! Grip that mat!” With my newfound Google/Wikipedia knowledge of cheetah’s claws and balance, I want to add, “Grip that mat like a cheetah?”

Will that help me speed up?

It is time for me to accept that for whatever reason, I am a tortoise. By disposition, by virtue of the cancer, by virtue of my depression, by virtue of the many things that have weighed me down over the course of my life, slowing my pace.

I’ve finally relinquished the desire to be the cheetah. Sleek is not for me. Fast is not for me.

But I will claim those claws.

For as a tortoise, I, too, know about claws. If planting those claws, gripping the mat, clenching the earth or the rubble underneath me will deliver balance, I will gladly accept it. I will welcome the slow way in which I sometimes teeter, clawed foot in the air until I can place it down firmly, at whatever slow speed I can muster.

And then take the next step.