Breast cancer patients know a lot about trust. As humans, we can see the outside of our bodies rather than the inside. But inside, disease can be growing, imperceptibly. We know what it is like to lose trust of our wellness.

We have to trust other people, healthcare providers, with solving the problem of our disease. And if we do our homework, we know that they have limits to what they can see as well as to what they can fix. The fit of this trust varies. I had wonderful providers. It was scary but I felt well taken care of, oriented, and supported. For others, the trust can be one made of seeing no other options, an uneasy and tenuous alliance.

Most of the time, when people speak of trust, they speak of trusting others with whom they share intimate relationships, spouses, children, parents, etc. We speak less of trusting ourselves, which is incredibly important. The breast cancer community has another trust issue. It is the issue of trusting organizations and institutions who say they are here to help us but who may be here to market our disease, use pink ribbons and such, in order to make money, money that will fill corporate pockets. Add in societal sexism and the sexualization of a disease, it’s a wonder that we trust anybody.

Many breast cancer patients, however, know that without trust there is no forward movement. And trust does not have to be blind. Trust is found in shades of gray just like the rest of life.

There are so many intersections between my breast cancer experience and my experience now in attempting to be an engaged and active citizen to work against the many rights and safeguards that are being threatened by our government. As you know, I was in one of the Women’s Marches on Saturday, one of over 600 internationally, targeting women’s rights and social causes. The groups represented were broad, not limited to women, and not limited to any particular race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or gender identification. However, make no mistake, women led this march. As a member of the breast cancer community, I saw that aspect of my life represented in the support for affordable healthcare, for example.

George Lakoff, Ph.D., a cognitive linguistic and Director of the Center for Neural Mind and Society at U.C. Berkeley, wrote about the women’s marches as a perfect counterpoint to our new president’s inauguration. He called it “The Politics of Care” and referred to the implicit associations we have as a culture between women and care-taking

After a wonderful day of peaceful marches on a global scale, some have already become disheartened. Not everyone trusts the marches. Some criticize the marches because they are not sufficient. Of course they are not sufficient. Other actions must take place. This criticism, in my mind, comes from not trusting that anything else will happen.

Another branch of criticism is about inclusion. Some felt excluded by the march. Some felt overshadowed by the march. There has been some talk of “where have all you white women been before now?” Those criticisms come from a lack of trust.

At this point I could say, “Hey, the solution to this is for us to all trust each other! We want the same thing! Group hug!”

I’m not going to say that. People who have been treated badly for who they are, what they believe, how much money they have, who they love, what they look like, what language they speak, how smart or not smart they are, etc, are not necessarily going to trust easily. And people with privilege are not necessarily brimming with trust, either.

Trust is something we must earn by being reliable and by being truthful, not just once but lots of times. This means that we need to keep working and trying. Keep your eyes on the goal. If someone complains, try to see the truth in what they are saying. This is not the same as agreeing. It is validating their emotions, at a minimum. Agree with parts of the view, if you can.

Find common ground. We are all humans with feelings. Connect on an emotional level. All of us love our families (even if it doesn’t look like it). Connect with shared values. And most importantly, work on the more difficult connections in person, not on social media. Engaging in endless arguments with people online will only deplete everyone involved and more seriously, discourage you from the important work that needs to be done. Don’t drop out of the movement because you’ve stopped trusting yourself.

Show up again and again.

Be open to learning and learn. A lot of us are new at this.

You know your own heart. Others will know your heart through your strong and caring hands.

Peace, friends.

Today was the first day of the Trump presidency. It was also the day of Women’s marches on ALL SEVEN CONTINENTS OF THE WORLD! Today, I marched with an estimated 130,000 people in Seattle. My husband and daughter were both there as were two of my friends. The expected number of people in the march was 50,000. The population of Seattle is about 650,000. The march was peaceful and so uplifting.

I am still sorting through this experience and planning my next steps. Marches begin and end with steps. But the steps must continue for change to take hold.

I’m not sure what to write but I am pretty sure that today was a day that will live on. So I am writing something, even if it is not perfectly coherent.

Today I felt a connection with humanity. I felt like a citizen of humanity. This kind of connection is the foundation of compassion.

Today is a very encouraging day. What happened means something. It means a lot. What happens next means more.

As always, peace.

When I was a girl in the 70’s, kids played a game at recess. It was dodgeball but I knew it only by another name, “Smear the Queer”. I didn’t understand the word, “queer”, except that it was a bad thing to be because it inspired “smearing”. In time, I would learn what this very hateful term meant. In time, other kids, now older, would use this word understanding what it meant. Word like these and the actions behind them had kept and continue to keep human beings in a dark place, out of the light, for no good reason.

The 80’s brought the H.I.V. epidemic, which originally almost solely impacted gay men. A community, already under fire by our culture, was now under siege by a disease. It was a time of particular crisis. ACT UP, an AIDS/HIV advocacy group started and their slogan, “Silence = DEATH” was appropriately chilling. A few years later, Queer Nation, took to the streets chanting, “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it.”

They decided to change the meaning of the word to a powerful one. Taking ownership of hateful names is one strategy used by some activist groups. I find myself bristling to this, given earlier connotations. It takes time to “get used to” a hateful word transformation.

Nearly 30 years later, I have an 18 year old daughter who identifies as “queer” and sings in a youth choir that is labeled as “queer” on their website. The word has a totally different meaning to these youth, who by the way, are very much out in the world, out of dark, and doing their best to deal with the hate that comes from the outside by being truthful about who they are.

The LGBTQ movement intersects with so many more activist movements, including the Women’s Movement. I am old enough to remember the changes that occured in the 60’s and 70’s. I have also observed the increasing backlash against women from a sizable portion of our culture, not to mention institutional sexism, which is pervasive.

Clearly, women in the U.S. have made gains. Clearly, we are threatened, along with so many other unrepresented groups. These are challenging times. We are less than one week from Donald Trump’s inauguration, and the threat is palpable.

The Women’s March was originally conceived by an ordinary woman who, shocked by the election, formed a Facebook event. By the time she woke up the next day, it had over 10,000 participants. Professional women’s protest organizers took the reins and an expected 150,000 to 200,000 are expected to attend the march next week in Washington, DC. There are sister marches planned for the same day, all over the U.S., and even in other countries.

I am attending the march in my city of Seattle. Like the DC March, we are knitting “pussy hats” to wear to the march. They are pink hats with cat ears. Pussy is a reference to President-Elect Trump’s characterization of women, which comes from our culture. Many male legislators also have an obsessive need to control women’s reproduction.

The pink part, well, pink has been associated with femininity for some time now. The word, “pussy”, with it’s crude and aggressive connotations, bothers people. (It bothers me, but I have decided that it is a good thing for me to “get used to”.) Pink, however, has controversial connotations among those of us in the breast cancer community. Komen co-opted the color to market our disease to make corporations rich. Pink has also been used to sexualize and trivialize our disease.

Women are constantly being put in the dark, in the shade. It was not that long ago that it was considered a bad thing to identify as feminist. We are in crisis. We know it.

We can choose to march.

We can choose to wear “pussy hats” or not.

We can choose to unify to use the power we have as a group that comprises over half of the voting population.

We can choose to recognize our chooses and attempt to take back the meaning of words to define ourselves for ourselves.

As always,

Peace

I have a confession to make. I am afraid of a number.  The number is 2017.

Actually it’s not only fear. I also feel an upswell of action. An eagerness to serve and fight the fight of righteousness.

A man, who would be a cartoon villain in an alternate universe, is going to be the President of the United States of America, in just under three weeks.

He is one man. He has his uniquely unqualified staff with him. He has his ridiculously ridiculous fingers that Tweet ridiculously ridiculous sequences of characters.

He is one person. We are many.

This is not a fight I wanted to fight but fight I will.

The pen is mightier than the sword.

The vote is mightier than the Tweet.

See you at the marches.

The path to peace often makes more than a ripple.

Sometimes we need a splash of peace.

Other times, a tsunami of peace is what is needed.

When I was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2012, it was totally out of the blue. I had no symptoms and felt no lump. I was just having a routine exam. The results of the exam and the subsequent assessments were less than routine. Suddenly, I found my life spinning, pointing in countless other directions.

Unplanned and ambiguous change is hard on the human brain, so hard that sometimes it causes trauma. Sometimes the current situation is clear, “this is bad” but the future is a series of questions, “how bad will it get?”, “will this end?”, and “how will this end?”.

Actually, the future is not clear. Many things can happen. There are times when the perpetual questions of the next moment, the next week, the next, month, and the next year, are a huge burden, the burden of no immediate answers.

While I have been managing the swerves of active cancer treatment and while I still manage my recovery and potential for recurrence, I have been parenting, alongside my husband, our adolescent daughter. Zoey was just 13 when I was diagnosed, a few months before she entered high school. Her life was already a struggle. Zoey was very unhappy and her life was full of suffering.

All of the things that needed to be done, were being done, to support her health. She was working hard, as well. Nonetheless, the subsequent four years have been full of trials and some tribulations. There have been times during which all three of us have felt we had nothing left to give, nothing left to try, and no hope. Fortunately, this typically did not happen to all of us at once. But sadly, there were many times when I was digging up as much energy and hope as I could because I was the only one of the three of us who was capable of doing so. It was better than not having those reserves, but it was isolating and exhausting.

John and I have been working to protect Zoey for many years. In fact, this is the first time I’ve mentioned her name in at least two years, due to a malicious comment about her by someone who somehow found my blog. Zoey is a brilliant person with prodigious talents. She has a very big heart, a very strong will, and often does not think before acting. This combination can be painful for her as well as those around her. There are also things about her that put her at risk for discrimination beyond the fact that she is an outspoken young woman. She yearned for validation and often received the opposite.

This last school year was Zoey’s senior year. My husband and I made a concerted effort to focus on her happiness and almost totally backed off from her academics. We accepted that she may not graduate high school. In other realms, we held her feet to the fire. We held her accountable for following family rules, for example. This was a shift rather than an abdication of parental responsibility.

The last year has been the year of letting go. There have been failures, upsets, and unexpected events. But there has also been a palpable undercurrent of emotional growth and increased stability. This made is much easier to keep letting go.

Zoey was finishing high school through a program at our local college, which allows students who test into the program to simultaneously earn high school and college credit. Since each quarter-long class was equivalent to an entire year of a high school class, she only had to take three classes per quarter. This was much easier for her to manage from an organizational perspective though the courses were intense and fast. Another downside was that there was no information available about her academic progress until after the end of the quarter and grades were posted.

In June, relatively started asking if we were having a graduation party for Zoey. John and I had taken a “wait and see” approach. It still was not clear that she was graduating. About a week after finals, John and I took a look at her grades for the quarter. She had not only graduated but earned the best grades she had ever had in many years! Honestly, these were respectable marks for any college student, let-alone a 17-year-old.

Something had happened in a very short time. Our kid, who had just weeks before blurted out that she only tried to get 70% in her classes (a C-minus and by the way, the minimum needed to graduate high school), had suddenly changed direction. She didn’t even have to take the physics class. In fact, we didn’t understand why she was taking it. Zoey was taking it because she was thinking ahead to the following year, when she plans to finish her associates’ degree to make her more competitive for entry into a four-year college.

Meanwhile, without any prompting from us, she was out pounding the pavement looking for a job. And she found one at a new restaurant in our neighborhood. The owner is also very active in the LGBT/Q community, of which she is a part, and I am hoping this will be a more supportive workplace than she has experienced in the past.

I have mentioned that Zoey is quite a good jazz singer. Before June had even come to a close, we attended a performance of hers at a downtown jazz club, organized by her vocal teacher, who is a very well-known jazz singer in this region of the country. There were nine students who performed with a professional big band, each singing three songs. Zoey was first and her teacher gave her a very sweet introduction, calling her “a treasure”.

Zoey has long been an excellent singer and performer but she knocked it out of the park! She had grown a lot. Zoey had star quality. We were just thrilled for her.

I haven’t written in a while because life has been a bit of a blur with all of this change. But I will say that I have taken opportunities for NOW, to keep my head pointed in the present direction instead of trying to adjust to where I think my life will land.

I still don’t know what the future holds. I can’t read the tea leaves. I have no crystal ball. But what I do have is now, which at this moment is a thing of great beauty, purpose, and meaning.

Zoey opted not to attend her high school commencement ceremonies. She had moved on to taking college courses two years ago. She did agree to let me take photos of her in my Ph.D. robes, which I wore when I was five months pregnant with her.