It's About What You CAN Do.

Four contemporary thinkers/speakers/writers I admire, clockwise from top left: Douglas Murray, Maajid Nawaz, David Rubin, Jordan Peterson.

I have been interested in the recent lectures of Dr. Jordan B. Peterson. His 12 Rules for Life makes great sense to me as a Stonewall-era gay man, a retired registered nurse and a survivor of both AIDS and cancer. I have been pleased to see his current connection with David Rubin, whom I respect as an openly gay media personality. He represents, in my opinion, a personification of the future many of us strove for in the Gay Liberation Movement of the 1970's. Dr. Peterson's message resonates with my own experiences in life.

That which does not kill you does indeed make you stronger, one way or another. However, it may also weaken your body irrevocably. I almost died from AIDS-related pneumonia in 1996. I had lost the ability to walk and breathe sufficiently for a spell. That was my first major lesson in what life can be about at any time.

To survive cancer in 2002, I submitted myself to thirty total pelvic high-level radiation exposures. Three weeks of toxic intravenous chemicals accompanied these tortures. The intravenous treatment included introducing a platinum compound into my veins. My burgeoning tumor, close to metastasizing into my lymphatic system, was vanquished. It shrunk down like the splashed wicked witch in Oz. A great success ... sort of.

I will not recount all the horrors my body experienced for the six months during and after my cancer battle. I will say I withered to 100 lbs below my life's peak weight. I lost the ability to walk briefly. My kidneys and heart sustained damage. But I didn't lose my hair. Funny that.

When I developed kidney failure and subsequent septicemia which effected my heart valve, after the tumor's defeat, I nearly died. My partner, Peter, who had the same cancer and treatment one year before me and before we met, was referred to a hospice program with a terminal diagnosis, because his treatment regime was equally harsh but his oncologist not as skilled as mine. So my dear Peter literally dragged himself to another hospital's cancer clinic, and he survived. We met while I was still recovering. It was an instant bond, built upon mutual support and mutual respect. 

This brings me to today's title: It's about what you CAN do.

This is the major lesson I have learned, above all others. It sounds so simple. It is not. Our brains are filled with a lot of unnecessary garbage by the time we become adults. When the body becomes disabled, the brain is gobsmacked. It first reverts to its reptilian center. It might just shut down all systems like a circuit-breaker. Waking up after several days of involuntary unconsciousness to the skeptical gapes of complete strangers in hospital scrubs is a complete identity reboot. It gets worse.

Finding you have tubes everywhere is bad enough. Then you realize that you are breathing through a tube into your trachea attached to a machine. Your lungs kick in. Alarms go off. The tube is unceremoniously yanked out. You gasp and sputter. If you're lucky, your lungs keep working and you mercifully pass out yet again. Hurrah!

What is the lesson? Well, dear friends, the lesson is not that you are an indomitable superhero (or vampire) with an immortal soul (or eternal life). You're just another schmuck who is going to end inevitably and all too unpredictably.

All that cancer mess was resolving fifteen years ago. Peter and I are still sharing our lives. Entering that relationship was perhaps the first thing I realized I could still do after being decimated by cancer treatments. I could still care about another, could still be vulnerable, could still learn a new way of living inventively with another. Peter and l have learned a lot about this together.

One of my doctors has a rather rankling habit of asking me at every check-up whether I am planning to travel abroad in the near future. Mind you, this is a man who has followed me since my cancer. He is aware of the various impediments to my walking to the local grocery store, let alone navigating airport lines. The radiation burns to my internal pelvic organs have left me with some inconveniencing daily complications, to say the least.

I calmly divert the conversation each time. I remind him that I have secured a safe and economically supportable home environment for Peter and me. That has taken buying, occupying, restoring and selling four properties in the last thirteen years to accumulate enough capital to avoid having to eat cat food in our dotage. Unlike many with AIDS and cancer, we are not totally dependent on the government for housing and food. In coastal Massachusetts, this takes quite a bit of work.

The same doctor's face goes somewhat blank when I tell him we live like secular monks. We eat regular meals. We don't drink alcohol of any kind. We don't take recreational, or quasi-medicinal, mind-altering drugs. We walk one to three miles a day, depending on the weather. Peter does this with the help of a cane. And the doctor seems skeptical when we say we each have an intellectual life of reading and shared conversation which makes our lives worth living. There's the added benefit that we are not getting E. coli from a cruise ship's buffet. 

Other medical personnel I have encountered look quite astonished when I explain that I can no longer eat meat, for example, despite the clear documentation of my kidney damage from cancer treatment and medications for HIV. When I explain that I have always been an avid cook, they look even more puzzled. I bake bread and cakes. I devise recipes with meat ingredients for Peter and company. This seems to bore these stalwarts of science and learning. The topic of mass tourism creeps in, usually as a recounting of their own recent trips abroad.

Living a worthwhile life after nearly dying comes with the clearing out of a lot of mental garbage if a survivor chooses to live happily without addiction or overbearing dependence on others. Becoming a poster ad for life-goes-on-as-usual after personal catastrophe seems quite common today in our media-driven culture. That distracts the healthy from the unhappy people they see every day in wheelchairs, with walkers, with canes. They feel reassured they would definitely choose to be one of those paragliding phenoms in trash media, even without arms and legs. What they do not realize is the remarkable dedication and cost to supporters in the background which is required to be one of those phenoms. They also do not realize that life seldom gives you those options. 

If you can live a life of adventure and exotic pleasures after personal disaster, that is what YOU can do. However, very few can do that. The key to living well (healthily) without being defeated by life's accidental limitation is doing what you can do, no matter how simple or mundane. Trying to live up to the expectations of others is the first thing to put aside. Gradual healing is sustainable healing. And that requires developing self-love and patience with yourself. Patience is not self-pity. Patience means trying hard to do what you can do but accepting failures as steps to eventual success. That's what healing is all about.