The Walls May Be Talking

(Or, Getting Better by Going Crazy)

I wrote this last week and wasn’t ready to share it until today.

The exhaustion is wild and relentless. The depression, bone-deep. When I write in the thick of it, the words sometimes scare me, so I let them sit until they don’t. It’s a small mercy I’m learning to give myself.

I didn’t know how to start that morning. I was waiting on PET results, worn out from a cold my son brought home and passed to me. I couldn’t get out of bed until nearly one in the afternoon, and even then, I had no real urge to eat or drink.

I spiraled into thoughts that served no one, least of all me. I reached out to people I trust, hoping to move through it, but the heaviness stayed.

So I decided to go to the hardware store and buy a can of paint.

There’s a room in my boyfriend’s house, where I’m staying, that we’ve been refinishing. The time had come for paint. The supplies were ready, but the actual paint wasn’t. I always feel like an idiot in hardware stores, but I like the challenge of doing one hard thing a day that has nothing to do with cancer.

In all my forty-four years, I’d never chosen to paint a wall white. White walls usually clash with my eclectic, Bohemian style. But as I ran my fingers over the color swatches, I thought, For once, with something this small, why not go against your grain?

So I did. I chose Swiss Coffee, which is a lovely shade of white.

Then I came home and realized I had forgotten how to open a paint can.

Hard to say if I forgot because of brain surgery, anxiety, depression, or the fog that follows immunotherapy. I wanted to quit more than once, but I have a teenager who struggles to stick with anything that doesn’t come easily. His dad and I are always reminding him that not knowing is the reason for learning.

Even though my son and I weren’t together that day, I wanted to model what I hope takes root in him.

So I didn’t quit. And I finished painting my first white wall.

It felt fitting that I landed on this project on a day I woke up too sad to move and too afraid to hear the results of a scan.
The scan is clear this time. I’m still learning how to believe that sentence.

Are clean slates available to me anymore?
Did I just prove they could be?

Maybe slates and scans and walls, in all their changes and colors, just need to exist — helping me understand myself.

Maybe that’s enough.

Maybe that’s what the walls are trying to say.