The world, Ernest Hemingway said, can kill you, regardless of how brave or gentle or good you are. If you’re lucky, though, the world just breaks you; if you’re even luckier, you can heal and come to grow strong at the broken places.

courtesy Quotepedia

I’m unashamed to admit that the world has broken me on more than one occasion. Broken people, like broken bones, heal over time, but some bones take longer to knit back together than others; the aftermath of a traumatic event can leave your psyche as wounded as a car crash can leave your body.

There’s something they don’t tell you when you encounter something that requires you to piece your life back together. When you’re deep in the thick of whatever’s going on, the only thought you have is I have to get through this, but once you actually find yourself on the other side, all the energy you’ve been investing in pure survival is gone, and you find yourself unable to think and act as a normal human being any more.

Cancer Sucks.

It’s no big secret that I’m a cancer survivor, and it’s a perfect example how the world will either break you or kill you. At the age of 26 I was diagnosed with a soft-tissue fibrosarcoma on my chest, and that it was a completely life-altering experience. My life had been hectic and stressful prior to my diagnosis, but nothing out of the ordinary; I was working a full-time job ata nice independent bookstore on Long Island that, while the pay wasn’t great, it allowed me to move out of my parents' house and into an apartment with a friend of mine from undergrad, and between the job and student loans, it kept me afloat while I went to law school at night.

Life is what happens when you make other plans, of course. Both my girlfriend at the time and my roommate had been bugging me to go in and have a strange scar on my chest looked at, as it had begun to grow, but I was so busy I kept putting it off. Finally I went in and they decided to remove a portion of it in order to biopsy it, and I joked for the two weeks following the surgery how my scar kind of looked like a vagina, until I went back to the doctor for my follow-up visit.

That fucking doctor. Have you ever seen the movie 50/50 with Joe Gordon-Levitt? His character finds out that he has cancer. When I watched it, years after my diagnosis, I was transported back to when the doctor looked at me and kind of shrugged, saying, “well it’s not exactly benign.”

How do you respond to something like that? Besides, “well what the fuck is it then, if it’s not benign? It’s fucking malignant? What’d I do to deserve this?” Or, like Gordon-Levitt's character said in the movie, “I don’t understand. I’m a good person. I even recycle.”

Frying Pan to Fire.

My life ground to a halt over the next several months. Work was impossible; going to law school even more so. I used up all my sick days and my vacation time, and withdrew from law school completely. I moved back into my parents' place; my relationship with my girlfriend self-destructed. I needed to go into treatment immediately, which culminated with a major surgery to remove any remaining malignant tissue from my chest wall. It's called a wide-margin excision, and it's exactly like it sounds: they took a large chunk of skin and tissue from my left chest, just under my collarbone.

Not quite so scary looking today.

I remember the whole thing vividly. It was May 17th, 2005. My family had gone out to dinner with my brother just two days before for his 21st birthday. The operation took several hours, leaving an incision that took over a month to heal and left a massive scar on my chest. When I woke up in recovery, I had things sticking out of me. Literally pipes and hoses stuffed up into my body cavities. One was a catheter, which was no fun once it got removed before I left the hospital. The other was a small plastic squeeze bulb attached to a piece of surgical tubing that terminated inside my chest cavity. That I had to empty several times a day and keep track of how much fluid was draining from my wound as it healed. It looked kind of like fruit punch. It wasn't.

Nothing Was Ever the Same.

Fat and happy with @alladesria, circa 2007

When I finally got myself free and clear, I was definitely broken: my entire life had been destroyed, and the day after I finally found out that I was healthy again (if you can call scarred and exhausted “healthy”), I woke up and didn’t know what the hell to do with myself. It was like coming out of suspended animation, only to discover everyone you knew from your former life had moved on with their lives without you, leaving you behind.

I went back to work at the bookstore after I got my clean bill of health, but things weren’t the same – I felt empty and alone. A large number of people who I once considered my friends had mysteriously vanished with the news of my cancer diagnosis, and this abandonment by the people in my life that I thought I could count on was more devastating than any physical illness.

The experience changed the way I approached people from then on; for a long time, I couldn’t understand what I’d done to deserve being cast aside. I felt that it was a failing on my part – I must have been a bad person, that I didn’t deserve to have people that cared about me in my life, and I went forward from there, walling myself off from anyone and everyone. Part of this was because I had convinced myself that I was worthless and was therefore undeserving of any sort of friendship, though a lot of it was out of a desire to not ever be hurt again as badly as I was by my so-called friends when they left me twisting in the wind.

It took years, but things were slowly beginning to get better for me. I’d begun to open my life back up to new people – the biggest gamble I’d taken was becoming involved with @alladesria, the woman that has since become my wife and the mother of my child – and it seemed like I was finally ready to lose the cast and crutches and get on with my life: I was living on my own again after having to move back in with my parents due to my illness, I was finishing my MA in English in upstate New York I and was looking forward to putting in my applications for a PhD program somewhere. In the meantime I had decided to take some time off and work while I enjoyed just living together with @alladesria and our ever-growing cadre of house cats.

Somehow, From Bad to Worse.

Then, the economy tanked. The universities I had applications in to all suffered cuts to their funding, dropping the number of new PhD candidates to record lows and precluding me from getting into a program. The only job I could get turned out to be a horrible inventory manager position at a major pet store chain 45 minutes away, one that required me to get up at 2 in the morning so I could get there before the early delivery showed up. That job lasted about two months before I had had enough of the hemophagic hours, abusive upper management, and horrible working conditions, though running over a rabbit on my way in one morning acted as a catalyst for making me leave.

A long stint of unemployment followed. No one was hiring anyone, anywhere, and I was out of work for five months before getting an even worse job as a call center rep for a cable company. Not only that, but the job was back down on Long Island, and the lease on our upstate New York apartment wasn’t up for another four months after that, so I lived during the week at my parents’ place and then spent the weekends with @alladesria, all the while dreading the end of the weekend, as it meant returning to a soul-destroying job where I was literally yelled at for ten hours a day while I daydreamed about driving off an overpass on my way home. Eventually our lease was up and we moved back in together in an overpriced apartment on Long Island.

That job lasted nine months until I had a complete and total breakdown. I woke up one day, went into work, spent about fifteen minutes on the phone with a particularly vile customer, and walked into the bathroom where I literally huddled in a corner of a bathroom stall and tried to prevent my heart from exploding. One of my supervisors found me in the bathroom and told me to go home – I never went back.

Darkest Days.

The bathroom of our apartment, complete with cat. Wasn't much bigger than that.

I spent another six months out of work. @alladesria and I couldn’t afford our new Long Island apartment any more, so we relocated to an attic “apartment” in Pennsylvania, where my car breathed its last the week we moved down there. Our landlord let us coast on a promise to pay until I found a job – a work-at-home gig writing copy for websites in the UK – and it was only until then that I started crawling back up out of the horror that had been my life for the last year and a half.

Things are a lot different today. Thanks to that job (and our landlord letting us slide), I was able to develop a freelance career that paid enough to allow me and @alladesria to move out of that attic into a nearby cottage on the property, find a new set of wheels, and even put some cash away for the future every week. Not only that, but I became a published fiction author, the two of us got married, had an incredible child, and moved back to New York; just a few days ago we closed on a house all of our own, though not without the constant support of my parents.

Bloody but Unbowed

The problem is my mind is so bent and twisted from going through all of this pain and fear for so long that it doesn’t realize that things actually are better now; all those old feelings of worthlessness and inadequacy are still there, just bubbling away under what otherwise looks like a calm surface, and the littlest thing can make me boil over and turn me into a complete wreck. I keep myself as closed off from others as I possibly can, not trusting the motives of anyone who moves to befriend me, and while I know that doing this leaves me isolated and without friends, the fear of being abandoned yet again is so great that it’s paralyzing.

The thing is, I know this is no way to live. I’m trying to change these things about me – trying to learn to take risks again and to allow myself to trust the people around me. I’m starting to reveal more of who I am to the world again, both in person and here on Steemit, even though it’s the most fucking frightening thing I can think of to do. The thing is, even though it’s makes me want to run and hide, I’m going to do it anyway. Bones itch while they heal - just ask my daughter. It’s going to be a lengthy, painful, uncomfortable convalescence, and I can’t tell anyone how long my recovery is going to take, but I’m tired of being constantly afraid of everything.

Despite all the pain that I’ve had to go through and despite how much shit keeps getting thrown at me, I am too stubborn to give up. I’m not going to let the world kill me, even though I may be broken; instead I’m going to become stronger at the broken places, and one of these days I’ll be able to walk on my own again. I guess I’m just asking for a little patience until I’m ready.

Me, @alladesria, and little Ellie, happy again!

This is the combination of two blog posts written several years ago, revised and updated for who I am today and how far I've come. The original posts can be found here and here.