I am three years into my cancer journey. August of 2016 was the month I learned my life would change. It’s been a hell of a ride so far.
A lot of people have told me they notice I have such a good attitude about the cancer. I tell them having agency in my own medical journey AND stellar at-home support are the keys to recovery with a sound mind. It’s an article for another time, but seriously y’all, being able to have choices was fabulous. With an out of control disease… having some control is NECESSARY. But I digress.
One of the interesting things I’ve noticed over the last three years is that the chemo stripped my mind of my normal coping mechanisms. For what, you ask. Well, I am pretty sure I have ADD. I say pretty sure because back when I was growing up, ADD or ADHD weren’t diagnoses. Not being able to sit still or listen very well were. Boys who had the wiggles and girls who daydreamed. All of that. It’s even more complicated because ADD and ADHD looks different in girls than in boys. And boys were the ones most studies are about… then… and STILL.
I’ve known I’ve had ADD since my early 20s when I was able to study such things at university. I figured out large quantities of caffeine, enough to keep one up all night in the form of “No-Doze” pills made me calm and withdrawn. All the same symptoms people taking who had ADD or ADHD and Ritalin, Adderall, etc., reported. It was enough tomato me look into why this would be. Thus, my amateur diagnosis of ADD. Because I’m not hyperactive. Just distractible.
As a child without a diagnosis, no one taught me how to cope with my world with the way I encounter it and how that didn’t work for the community at-large. I figured out that I needed low noise in the background to study. That standing up and walking for a minute helped. I learned how to stick information int the right mental file cabinet and I learned how to access it with ease. And I figured out how to get my body and mind to cooperate.
Chemo strips all of your mental coping mechanisms. That is, until you can re-trace those pathways afterward. But the way my brain is and the things that chemo did to it are both fascinating and frustrating. I am relearning how to cope all over again. With new behaviors. Some are old ones my brain is learning to use again. Some, though, are new ones. I don’t think I understood just how much my brain had learned to work around my distractibility or my desire to DO ALL THE THINGS AT THE SAME TIME, which is almost the same thing as being distracted. Being TOO attracted, if you get what I mean.
At some point in the last 13 years, I learned mediation. Well, I learned a form of it as an older teenager to help my brain stop whirling and go to sleep, but I mean I learned mediation deliberately as a thing in and for itself. One of the ways yoga has you mediate is to step back and watch what your mind brings up as you try to sit in nothing. Your monkey mind will have thoughts. What they are and how often thoughts come are interesting things to observe. Observing the ego is a fascinating thing. I don’t know what happens in other people’s minds, but in mine when I first started mediating, I would have MANY thoughts all coming in and out of my brain at different speeds. Lots of them and often. As I sit longer and longer in stillness just watching, my thoughts would slowly slow down. At no time have I ever had a mediation experience with no thoughts floating through. Even if it is one or two thoughts coming through every once in a while, I always have a thought running it’s narrative inside my head.
I am pretty sure mediation has helped me recover from chemo and having an ADD mind. Being able to sit and watch as my brain tries different things to get information into the correct filing cabinet AND be able to retrieve it has been interesting, to say the least.
It’s been three years since a diagnosis changed my life.
Hopefully, it won’t take eighteen to relearn or lean anew techniques and tactics and strategies to cope with my learning disability. My parents had to “donate” playground equipment to keep me in kindergarten because of my bad behavior as a kid, I’m not sure I have the wherewithal to make a “donation” to stay in society as an adult. Costs have skyrocketed, after all.
