And another thing…

I have an exam I should be studying for, and if I was going to thumb my nose at higher learning, there is a bed I should crawl into because I have to work in the morning, but whatever.

I got lots of feedback and such for that last post about trying to be grateful while feeling really pissed off and ripped off and more than a bit confused.
Oddly, it seems to be all cancer survivors who wrote to say anything about that post. And really, I think that is both fine and cool.

I think it is really interesting that I am not the only one who is just fantastically pissed off about having gone through this nasty cancer episode. It’s good for me to know there are other folks out there who are a bit pissy about the whole thing, because, as I mentioned, I *feel* like I should be ever so happy to have made it through, this far, to the other side.
And, as I mentioned, I am.
And I also really miss the person I was before cancer came in and bleached a whole lot of sunny emotion from my life.
I don’t really want to say that you can’t understand unless you have gone through something similar. But I think most people actually can’t. I am not trying to be all precious and unique.
It’s just totally weird.
And it happened, and I would like to move on.

Here’s the flipside.
Here’s the sunshine head episode. People who know me in real life may need to walk away now.
But here’s what I have been thinking lately.
I know this cranky man through my work. Being cranky is his day to day approach to life. If a crisis comes up, he has a variety of different personas, most of which are friendlier and easier to be around, and he opens the bag and lets some other aspect of his personality come to the forefront, and it’s very interesting.
It’s very interesting to me to realize that being cranky is a choice he has made and it is his default position.
It’s interesting to me to see how he is happy being unhappy.
And I don’t want to be that beast.
And that’s part of what is freaky about the whole ‘pissy apres cancer’ scene. When does the crabbiness stop being reasonable and when does it start anchoring itself on to your soul and make every day an Eeyore day?

Okay, so anyone who really really knows me should really really turn away now.
Cuz the sunshine is about to become blinding.

Here’s the thing of it.
And this is a message to myself way more than it is a message to anyone else.
Every day we wake up and, to some extent, we get to influence what sort of day we are going to have.
I think the most important thing we can bring to any day we have above ground is some degree of compassion and caring for the people around us.
I think we all have to decide who we want to give our compassion to, but really, that stuff, those fluffy emotions, are the things that make us human and it is those things that we do for each other that make life worth living.

So, there you have it.
The sunshine episode.

Don’t get me wrong; I ain’t got any of this down yet. But it is on my mind.
I guess my point is, I think we have every right to be angry and grumpy and confused and testy and anything else we may feel.
And at some point, I think we have to swim back and join the school we came from, even if we did get pulled up on the deck of the boat. For whatever reason, we got kicked back in the ocean and we got another chance.

So maybe we still got the wound from the fish hook, but it’s way better than being surrounded in mayonaisse and sourdough bread.

We have a second chance and we gotta get swimming.

(comments rescued from the crash)