Swearing as a meditation

In December 2015, after long and difficult journey to find a specialized surgeon to remove my chronic endometriosis I was finally going to start the pain-free life I’d always fantasized about. Very quickly the pelvic pain I’d had most of my adult life began to go, but for some reason I wasn’t getting my strength back. In September of 2016 I noticed a lump in my breast but disregarded it as a cyst or some other benign fluctuation. By December it was unavoidable and so I got an appointment for a mammogram which immediately showed a large, solid mass in the center of the breast. A biopsy revealed more tumors in the lymph nodes in the neighboring armpit and on February 14th I went in for a surgery to remove the breast and all of the lymph nodes in that area. It was stage 3 which is treatable. Chemo began in March, there were 8 rounds of three different kinds of chemo administered every 2 weeks for 4 months. This was followed by 25 daily radiation sessions. There is a risk that the cancer is already in other parts of my body waiting to reoccur, but the hope is that the chemo and radiation got them. For the next 10 years I’ll also be on medication to hopefully help prevent a reoccurrence.

Usually 6 months or so doesn’t seem like a lifetime…This is because I did not know what cancer treatment would feel like. Chemo stops cell division and that feels a lot like life stopping; it gets very hard to think clearly, memories are lost and new memories are nearly impossible to hang on to, and on top of this there’s intense, systemic physical pain and frequent, overwhelming nausea. Sorry if this sounds bad, there are a lot of things I’m not talking about here because I don’t want to scare anyone and of course everyone experiences these things differently and not everyone is given the same types of treatment.

There were many days when all I could do was lie down, even speaking would bring on overwhelming pain or nausea. Sometimes I would be overcome by sadness or fear and then tension would follow, and that tension would exacerbate the pain and nausea. With a mind dominated by a powerful fear of death and suffering I could not meditate because all I’d do was cry with fear and horror. While this was a good outlet, I had almost no strength and so if I surrendered to crying I would be giving up being able to walk up the stairs or eat a meal. So I needed another way to calm myself and since I’d always calmed myself as a child by drawing, I instinctively felt drawn to it. An ipad and apple pencil made it easier to draw from my sickbed and a simple little app called *Amaziograph was basic enough that even at my sickest I could enjoy the basic act of putting pretend ink to pretend paper.

What I am trying to communicate is what was made it so essential for me to draw this way, why it was all felt I could do, and how many times drawing saved me from falling into a deep depression in the midst of all the pain and nausea.

Despite my desire to create and soothe myself with art, I was also very angry at the bad luck of having spent decades dealing with pain from endometriosis only to get breast cancer just as I thought there was an end to it. The disgusting effects of the treatment, the frightening and painful experiences kept on coming... Hence my patterns contained a lot of profanity. I wanted to swear and I needed to swear. If I could have, I’d have been shouting those profanities from the rooftops! But I had no strength to raise my voice or even stomp around, so that left my drawings. I could write down an exclamation of disgust, carefully and lovingly so that seeing it gave me strength, reminded me that I have a voice and I am still alive. Seeing the repetition of my words and patterns calmed me, the inherent beauty of them made me feel in harmony with life again and able to rest.

When I was drawing these patterns and posting them online for my own edification I found that people gravitated towards them. Their enthusiasm and enjoyment of my drawing fueled my recovery, and there were many times when sharing laughter with strangers over another swearing pattern was the brightest moment of my day. People often asked when I’d be able to put these patterns on clothing and other things, so I made it my mission to recover as quickly as possible so that I could give people this. Now my brain and my strength are slowly returning enough for me to handle making stores and filling them with things covered in my patterns.

Setting up products with my patterns isn’t as natural or easy a thing for me to do as designing patterns, so I’ll be slowly adding to the store as I figure out more, but I wanted to get it started so that everyone can enjoy these weird little missives from my fractured time.

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