How Terminal Brain Cancer Saved My Life

The timing of my diagnosis was magical.  I had , just a year earlier, signed up for EVERY benefit the insurance our work offered us, since I was about to turn sixty and thought I should play it safe.

 THANK YOU PAST SELF1!

Terminal cancer gave me early retirement from the toxic workplace. As workplaces go, you can do worse than radio, although radio has its share of narcissistic dickheads, and the pressure of the job is to Be Brilliant without ever experiencing direct audience feedback, which is Impossible.  In that sense, it's an impossible job.  There are many impossible jobs that many brave people pull off every day, and while teacher, nurse, and firefighter com to mind,  I maintain that although it's much less heroic and substantive, radio is still one of the more impossible jobs.  You sit in a room by yourself and talk to EVERYONE, presuming you're making intimate, sensitive, relevant contact.  It's INSANE, now that I ponder it.  That's why so many old-fashioned announcers sounded so grandiose and fake.  They had to bluster to keep themselves from feeling the existential impossibility of meaningful contact with EVERYONE going on a one-way feed from a closed box.  Of course the feedback comes on the phone, somewhat delayed, and often unnecessarily toxic.  

I've chastized myself for hundreds of painful hours over every bruising mistake I ever made on the air. Mistakes are impossible to avoid, but that's what I spent most of my energy in prep time doing.  After being literally SCREAMED at by my first listeners when I got artist facts wrong (doesn't matter if you get the "facts" from Creme magazine interviews with the artists themselves.  YOU are supposed to KNOW more.  You're On The Radio, aren't you?) But air personalities are hired for their voices, not necessarily their degrees in musicology.  (Magazine models, if you'll pardon the grandiose comparison, are not usually great seamstresses, photographers or makeup artists; they get hired due to genetic "gifts".)Most of us on the air had to fake it, because most of us, like most other real humans, had our favorite bands whom we could hold forth on with accuracy, but not ALL bands.  At some point you have to look shit up.  And it doesn't always go well.  There's a lot of faulty, drug-addled music "journalism" out there, especially circa '60-something thru seventy-something, although the cocaine/or meth-fuelled eighties had their moments, too. Rock fans are especially VICIOUS when they attack, fuelled by cultural righteousness and Hell Bent For Leather.  Not only that.  Men (the bulk of rock listeners who also would qualify under the FBI profile as Most Likely to seal a woman up in a Rubbermaid tub and slide her into a crawl space just to Shut Her Up)and who are for whatever reason triggered by women's voices can be vicious to the point of evil.

For example, the very first studio phone call I ever answered was from a guy "in the parking garage" who promised to cut off my head "and fuck the throat hole"because at least "that should shut me up."

I was a veteran of nightclubs when I arrived in the air studio that night, so this didn't shock me like the guy "in the parking garage"(doubtful- in the late 80's most people who weren't James Bond didn't have cell phones yet, and parking garages didn't have phone booths, but he probably figured he was terrifying enough that I wouldn't put those facts together.  He also probably figured I wouldn't park on the street. I hate parking garages.  He guessed a lot of things wrong).

I also wasn't thrown off by the way I was greeted by the co-worker whom I was told was going to train me on the board that night, a dude I will refer to as RM, since he may be a different person now.  People do grow.   I also wasn't thrown because I had taken it upon myself to be prepared; I had made friends with the sista-woman who did middays on the Fox, Rachel Wilde, and she was more than willing to train me on all the equipment.  I myself am a sista-woman and a good listener..  She got to share what it was like working with all the dudes.  I worked with a bunch of dudes, too. and we commiserated.  She helped me out a lot.  I owe a fuck ton of my success to Sisterhood.  By the time I walked into the air studio for my first-ever show  and Mister RM looked me up and down with a bitter sneer and said, "Oh, yay, a woman, huh?  Well, you're so special, you figure it out,"slung on his motorcycle jacket and stomped out of the studio, I was in no danger of cluelessness.  Rachel had given me all the preset numbers I needed.  I had memorized them, but also written them in block letters on a sheet of lined notebook paper that I now pulled from my back pocket.  With shaking hands I carefully set the slide pots to proper positions: Microphone level, for my female voice:  11 1/2.  Board master:  11 even.  Denon CD players:  9 1/2.   I had them all. I knew where the liner cards were and how to taylor them to the overnight daypart.  I knew how to talk to one person when I popped the mic, how to picture that person, and had worked with Rachel to get comfortable with the ideal Person in the demographic I could aim my breaks to.  I knew who was listening this time of morning and what I wanted to say to him. (No parking garage creeps.  I pictured an Average Guy working overtime and just trying to finish out his shift awake to get the week over with, hoping some good rock and roll would help.  I talked to him.)

I found the correct date and time on the paper commercial and music logs and set them up (again, this was the late '80's.  No computer logs yet, no email yet.Of course RM hadn't, as a professional courtesy  pulled my first hour of music CDs or commercial carts, (I would find out in ensuing years the man had no courtesy of any kind)but it gave me more practice! I learned to find my way around the studio. I obviously pulled(the first TWO hours, for the morning show who came on after me.  They don't thank anyone, BTW...it's like royalty.  Morning shows tend to recieve favors done for them as Right of Rule.  Anything you did for them you just SHOULD have done.Lots of afternoon drive people are like that, too, depending on how many national teams they announce for....but I digress...

Terminal Brain Cancer Lifted the worry of living homeless (mostly that's on my boyfriend, though, who let me live under his roof rent-free for seventeen years).  I get close to half of what I used to earn in salary sent to my credit union account every month.  A friend of mine made the mistake of saying the gov't was "giving" it to me.  I regret the tirade I unleashed upon her, but I remember in my working years looking at the one-third of my paycheck that would vanish each payday and telling myself, "Social Security, I might need it someday."  

Well, it's someday.  And I paid IN.  For forty-six years of WORK.  I EARNED these checks, the way I see it.  From stuffing cars at fourteen to reading TV ads at sixty, I put in my half-century, or thereabouts.

Terminal Brain Cancer brought me The Magic of Medicare and Humana. Yes, Medicare takes around two-hundred a month from my account.  It also, through Humana, gives me over one hundred dollars on a med card for food and OTC goods.  Not to mention paying for all of my prescrptions and appointments.  My breathing has never been better.  When I was working my asthma inhalers, not just the emergency ones you see geek characters carrying in horror films(why did asthma become the mark of a LOSER?), but the kind that prevent attacks and give you an actual LIFE, those used to cost me $500.00 a month.  When I was working I couldn't afford to breathe.  I had to suppliment my lack of income by leaning at the end of pay periods and in unforseen disasters on credit cards, which I was  never able to pay off.  I'm working on that now.  If I die before they get paid off, I'm not stressing about that. I worked my guts out for fifty years, and if that wasn't enough, then the Powers That Be will have to fucking deal with it, since they rigged the game to begin with.  I have done my best, and at times stretched myself beyond my best into my own self-destruction, as have so many who were raised with, and obeyed, the Work Ethic.  I'm done with that now.  But that is what our financial system does to the workforce-it asks you for more than your best; it demands your slow, systmatic destruction.

Side Note:  the Work Ethic I had always bought into, which I was raised with in place of, or rather as, religion, I now believe turned out to be the most nefarious force in our culture and resulted in a variety of evils from income inequality to the golden idol of Trump. I believe this because I've seen the result of my own codependence in relationships with narcisists. The codependent rushes about trying to please, toiling thirstily, as the narcissist grows rich and self-satisfied at the clear evidence of their own superiority.  It's a sick schema played out, not only in meth-addled trailers, but in sky scraping offices.   I believe it is the End Game of Manifest Destiny.  Big White God said, "This land is yours.  It's all yours.  "It's all yours to eat whole without conscience or to just take a shit in. Take it all. Go for it.The women, the dark-skinned people without technology to match yours in battle, the oceans, the air, all the water.  All the women, all the children you can exploit.  Use them up, too.  Use 'em up.  Eat 'em up. They all belong to the GREAT YOU."  And they did.  And they don't want to hear any complaints about it now.  "God said it was OK.  I am made in his image.  That blue-eyed Jesus looks just like my cousin Carl.  Hell, I practically AM God!  I do what I want!  You women have complaints?  I guess we don't get to burn you alive anymore, but we'll find ways to shut you up." 

 The toxic work ethic that ruled my life, and what I did not see coming, since I was so thirstily rushing about, was the terrifying twenty-year financial spider hole that yawns for working class people older than fifty-five, when you've most likely already been fired and you've found out all that shit about "wisdom" is just crystal magic bullshit and really only applies to wealthy celebrities,, and the time when your SSI checks will finally pay you enough to live on  (for many working-class people not until age SEVENTY-SEVEN) threatens to swallow you in your worst nightmare, as you find yourself in physically gruelling, humiliating jobs while you wear out a lifetime of friendships couch-surfing or living in back yard sheds, eating from trash cans and shitting in buckets.Adding injury to insults, by fifty-five many people have a laundry list of injuries, from back and foot injuries limiting their ability to do jobs that pay decently, to invisible neurological conditions like depression (Gee, YA THINK?) to PTSD.  Then they've got politicians and their militias yelling at them for being Losers or a "permanant underclass"(I hope it's a hot day where you are, Limbaugh) or making them feel like they just weren't smart enough or didn't work hard enough.  And that is all unmitigated BULLSHIT.

Life is just fucking hard.  Especially if you're a woman, which means you were a lower earner most of your life and not part of the favored gender club, which only works in your favor if you're a Taylor Swift lookalike-and even she won't be at fifty-fucking-five.  But she'll be selling us songs about why we should love ourselves anyway(BUT will she be coIntinuing the vintage Vivtoria's Secret meat market in her concerts?  AND-bonus question-how will she eventually gracefully END that bullshit anyway?  Just tell the bellowing men who used to buy tickets to her shows to drop off their wives and fuck off to Hooters for a couple hours till the show is over?  Or will she open her own chain?  She certainly could afford to, and she could make BANK...but what would she call that chain of meat markets?  Tay Tay's Ta-Ta's?

The fourth way terminal brain cancer saved my life:

4.  Perspective.  It's a common question the bored ask each other:"If you knew you only had so much time to live, what would you do/care about?"  And what you care about and focus on does change.  For me, not a LOT, because I've always been a person who cared more about living things than numbers on paper (mainly because numbers on paper jump around and insult me) and more about relationships than reputation, but I became even more intensely focused on time with people I love and care about(and when I say "people" I include furry people like my dog, Georgie and my cat Lucille and I still dream of the day they can be in the same room quietly).  Love really is all that matters.  I feel that even more intensely every day now.  

I  knew a dog would bring me more expense and hardships of one sort or another, and it has.  But also, LOVE.  Dogs are just LOVE MACHINES(sorry, but I could have stuck a much worse song in your head, considering the subject) and they are miraculous.  They remind us what is important; they keep us connected to our essential selves.  When you adopt a dog you invite a Teacher into your home and promise to provide for them and learn from them, that's my view.  And cancer, in part, inspired me to finally make the leap and adopt a dog of my very own.  I don't remember when I've been happier.

In all of the above ways,THANK YOU CANCER!

The Deep State Fucked My Brain

 Things started fine.  My Dad was a combat veteran, a Marine in the Pacific theater in WWII.  He had to hide in ancestor caves during the hurricane in Okinawa to survive-just one horror story.  If we had not pulled all the troopes out of Japan and brought my Dad home I would not exist.  So my very existence is tied to our bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I'm a baby of the bomb.

But-Iwas brought up in the land of the Transcendentalists.  There's no escaping the culture of literacy if you live in New England, even if you're backwoods working poor, like all my peeps.  Rich people-highly educated rich people(they all are)-own everything in New England.  They do all the hiring.  They tend to believe in spreading the good, which includes the books.  You can't escape Rudyard Kipling (I had memorized all the Just-So stories by the time Dr Suess was offered at the local library)Emily Dickenson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charles Dickens, Henry David Thoreau,  Jane Austen, or the Brontes, not for the life of you.  There's a Shakespeare theater smack in the middle of rural Maine, for cryin' out loud, and it's packed to the gills all summer season.  Word gets out about Hamlet's father's ghost, and even local hicks will crowd in to catch that action(backwoods people in Maine are not rednecks, thank you very much.  We are hicks.  We leave rednecks to the ignorant South, whom we are the betters of. We are all decendants of abolishonists-or, at least that's what we're all told by our Grandmas.  Grandmas, not "meeemawws", thank you. 

Of course we've got churches.  Lots of 'em.  But they are kept to their own purposes. People in New England remember that the Pilgrims came here for freedom of religion;it's a point of pride in the region.  I dare you to lift your fists about that in a local donut shop.You will lose.  And you will be thrown out, without your coffee to go.

So, that was part of the problem.  I grew up immersed in the culture of our  founding fathers. 

Then, there was my liberal arts education.  Well, there wasn't much else to choose from.  And I sucked at math.  

English Lit was my direction; that and theater.  You can see how I was already vulnerable to the Deep State mentality.  And I fell into it, hard.  

The thinking still shows up in my brain on a daily basis.

For example, when I have a bone to pick with somebody, I automatically approach the conflict with a mind open to changing my own point of view or learning from the other party (WRONG!  I KNOW!) and presume that if they and I work together we can co-create a mutually satisfactory solution to the problem. 

 This is the kind of communist-brainwashed thinking the Deep State instills in young, vulnerable minds.  I have done some recovery, though.  I no longer take my rules for life from the Socratic Method.  (Socrates?  Who da fuck was he?  Socrates sounds like Satan!  Close enough!  Was Jesus even around with the ancient Greeks yet?  Well then they're all burnin' in hell annaways!  Everybody knows you get your rules of life from the WWF, not old dead Greek statue guys!Isn't all that Greek stuff porn anyhow?)  I know better now. When you have a conflict, you blaze in with the most hurtful fucking insults you can think up, and then you HIT YOUR ENEMY OVER THE HEAD WITH A CHAIR!  

YEAH!

I will fit into this world yet!

Clash of the Narcissists

 Thirty years in radio had given me a pretty solid understanding of fundamentals like knowing your audience, connecting with your audience, expanding your audience, and basics of media like that, so I believed I had something to bring to the gig of volunteer managing a local storytelling organization's social media.  I had lurked over the organization's Facebook page and seen the same seven individuals' popping up Likes on the same kinds of posts at the same times and days of the week for weeks, and as it turned out when I was able to look at the actual page stats there were no surprises.  It was sleepier than a rest home library.  Nobody was under the age of sixty.  I'm no ageist, but at some point you have to feed the funnel or the art will die.  I was concerned.  Where were the young storytellers?  Were they all at the Moth?  The Moth was boring (read: formulaic) in its own NPR way.  Would the generations just stay in their own rooms, isolated from one another, never trading stories or inspiration? Was there no crossover? It depressed me.

All the over-sixties I knew were members of a volunteer organization that told stories in local schools-a wonderful endeavor, but it tended to keep many of them in a rather saccharine vein, telling in a "safe for kiddies" sing-song tone, which seemed to me to be a style trap, because it did seem to bleed over into other stories they told. I was also concerned about the lack of community crossover.  Where were the tellers of color?  How could we be a vibrant society, a melting pot, a rainbow, if we kept telling and hearing the same stories over and over? 

One of the local tellers I admired most and still do is a young man named Cooper Braun-Enos, who was one of the creators of the Fairy Tale Festival with his partner in crime and brilliant teller in her own right, Ann Harding. Their tagline for the festival was something like, "Fairy tales are not just for children."  

Yes!  I thought..  I believed that deep in my soul.  Stories of all kinds should be for everyone, and I (quite arrogantly)  felt it was time to remind everyone of this. This was where my own narcissistic arrogance got me in trouble. This was behind my reckless decision to push the boundaries of the Facebook audience.  I felt it was time to remind everybody - the half dozen over-sixty "everybody" I had documented who had actually seen it-that stories were a living, vital art form, a multi-generational form encompassing many kinds of emotions and situations, way beyond  mythical ducks and bunnies and fairies and how to play nice.  I wanted to remind everyone of the visceral quality of great telling and how it could wake up the heart with big questions and great drama.  And that kind of arrogance, to "remind" master storytellers, takes a narcissist.  I was that narcissist.

It does take a narcissist (or a psychologist) to spot one, and while I've spent many years in helpful therapy like Dialectical Behavioral Training and nonviolent communication groups.  I've also recently been diagnosed by an accredited therapist at the minimal end of the narcissistic spectrum, having amassed skills like Active Listening and Making Space For Others.  Also I practice self-awareness, so I don't cast this next aspersion without reflection: 

The communal narcissist is a creature you will meet in volunteer situations.  The person I will call V. is such a creature. V. sent me, upon seeing the Facebook video I posted, thee most vicious email I have ever received. It's paraphrased from memory below, super-short in an effort to be fair. 

Myself being (I don't say it proudly) strategic,  I phrase all missives in such a way as to get the best result, so I keep emails(which are permanent record) brief, non-blaming, and if addressing a conflict, I suggest positive action almost immediately, and end pleasantly so I would have sent something like this: 

R,

Regarding the video you posted on the FB page tonight at 546 PM,  of Cooper Braun Enos's performance; it contains some objectionable language that I find worrisome, as children could be exposed to it.  

Please remove it ASAP.

Thank you for your urgent attention to this, and for utmost caution regarding such material in the future.

We appreciate your help.

Best Regards, etc...

V. was not strategic.    V. went straight for the jugular. She did not even bother to specify her subject matter.

Here is hers:(more or less. It’s paraphrased from memory):

 

What were you thinking?

Take it down NOW.

I've contacted everyone and we all decided you either didn't bother to watch it first or you didn't get what it was about.

(Translation: you are either lazy or stupid)

You are going to have to do better than this.

Take it down.

NOW.

I did not send her a copy of the Xcel Worksheet with the dates, times and data of visitors to the page including ages, frequency of visits, memberships, and other pertinent stats proving that no one over the age of  sixty saw the video (and it's not possible to conclusively prove; a grandchild could have been sitting on the lap of a pearl-clutcher).  I did not send the document of my hours or give my reasons showing the lack of national and local interest in storytelling events in contrast to video game sales or other relevant metrics.  I did not give her fuel for the fire.  I bent over and took my lashes like a good covert narcissist with a quick, humble reply saying, "I will be much more careful in the future." while carefully not admitting to wrongdoing.

The communal narcissist has the same grandiose need for validation as other varieties of the illness, but has their self-esteem so enmeshed with the success of the organization or cause or both, that their very survival instincts are triggered, like a mother raccoon's would be to find a scorpion in her nest of kits, when something happens too far out of their control.

I have done a lot of volunteer work so I have met many communal narcissists, and my narcissism clashed with their narcissism, causing great messes and drama.  I have learned:  just walk away. 

Also, I got help with my narcissism.  That wasn't what we called it then, but I learned and grew.  You can if you want to.

And then, thank god, you can walk away. 

Clash over.  But it makes a good story.