Life is one long process of getting tired.
Samuel Butler
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After all these years, I still am not sure what I want to be when I grow up. Or should the question be “who I want to be?” “What” suggests a search for a career or profession. “Who” asks a much deeper question, inquiring about the kind of person I hope to become. Forgive me if I’ve addressed this question before…maybe many times before. It is a rather important question asked repeatedly over a timeframe approaching a lifetime, but never fully—or satisfactorily—answered. The question is relevant not only to the future. It applies to now. Today. And in the past. And not only to “the kind of person I hope to become,” but to who I was and who I am. Do we change over time from the person we once were into a significantly different person? That question has rattled around in my head for what seems like an eternity. At some point, the question will become irrelevant. It may already be irrelevant, but for different reasons.
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My hands have appeared soft and plump for most of my life, but they have changed remarkably in the last eighteen months. Tendons and blood vessels, once invisible beneath my skin, now show clearly; a network of bulging blue veins are prominent on the tops of my hands. And tendons (or, maybe, bones) interrupt the once-smooth surfaces, jostling with the blood vessels for space. In other words, my hands look like they belong to an old man; I can’t argue that they do not. The skin of my face and neck has spent the majority of my life looking younger than my years. But like my hands, those physical attributes have changed. Weight loss—and, I suspect, daily consumption of prescription medications augmented with a variety of chemotherapy drugs—has left the skin on my face and neck loose and wrinkled. My arms and legs, too, are draped in skin that looks like crepe. That largest of my organs emphasizes that my youth has drained from my body, leaving me an “ego in a bag of skin,” to use a phrase written by Alan Watts.
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The time will soon come to eat some breakfast: leftover salmon (delivered last night by a wonderful friend) and some papaya (left by another wonderful person, as I wrote yesterday). Perhaps the two dishes will improve my platelet count enough to ensure my continued participation in the clinical trial. So early in the process, yet the formal trial has not even begun. But I am already tired of it. I told mi novia yesterday I have felt fatigued and weak for eighteen months. Not utterly worn out, but approaching that sense of depletion. I had expected the cancer treatment to have had some positive effects by now; at least enough to trick my body into thinking I was making progress. More than a month has passed since my most recent chemo treatment, with no noticeable change. That’s not saying much, I guess, in that most treatments were given a three-week intervals.
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If I did not wake up tired, I would feel something was amiss.
