So... I have been neglecting my blog. Not sure anyone reads it anyway.
The plays... Oh, fuck me, the plays... I'm procrastinating. I'm not good with success; it's too foreign to me.
But here is where I am:

Pretty Little Pincushions is the first play, but really they can be in any order as they should (in theory) stand on their own. It focuses on Maddie, my central character, as she traffics through the chaos of chemo and loneliness.

The Lion and the Airplane is the second, and I know it can stand alone, although it needs more work. It focuses on Maddie visiting her family after chemo, & how they treat her if she's merely gotten a short hair cut. The impact of her near death & ENORMOUS struggle is only hers, and she has to learn to navigate within her already dysfunctional, and recently unglued, family as this new person that even she has not met yet.

The Imp of the Perverse is the final play, but, again, could stand alone (I hope!), and even go first if you want to Tarrantino the whole thing. In Imp Maddie, making attempts to find someone to latch onto, or someone to save her from herself, has to discover, like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, that home & love & what she really wants is and always been inside of her the whole time... Or, at least that is what I'm aiming for her to discover, but I'm still writing.

The entire thing is called The Afterlife Trilogy or Afterlife Plays. I hope to get back to writing very soon. I'm not sure if I took a break out of fear, out of laziness, or because I needed to discover things for myself before my alter-ego could. Plus, (and this is my big excuse) it's very difficult to get any writing done when the lady in the apartment below me is constantly screaming at someone.

So, there's that. My update on my progress. If you can even call it that. I'll try to write more soon, probably about my shitty brothers. I need to get that out of my head, so writing it down may truly help. We shall see...
Until next time
M

A woman in an online group posted that she was still feeling bad, as in mentally and this is my response. I felt it might translate to others. It really is why I have chosen to focus my plays more on the afterlife of cancer. It seems like less covered terrain.  

 I had a major mental & emotional collapse in the year after ACT, during Herceptin. It's common. I've heard others say they get depressed & anxious. I will admit that I thought about suicide. I had a great therapist at Sloan-Kettering who got me into a program to deal with everything that came up during chemo/cancer. It turns out that having a terrible childhood and then getting cancer as an adult don't go well together. So it did allow me to deal with my shit. I'm also on Lexapro & Klonipin. And I'm on disability for the PTSD & other things. I agree about the "blinders" idea. It's so overwhelming that we can only look at a piece of our experience or just the part we are in, but when it ends we look back at the giant bomb that destroyed a city, and we think 'oh shit, that happened to ME!' My therapist said that most people go through life taking certain things for granted, like the daily risks of life- driving, walking across a street, etc- when faced with death we are suddenly seeing the other side of a coin that we never really knew had another side. And it's hard to unsee that. I hope that translates. I send you hugs & highly recommend a therapist twice a week at least, and art therapy- it's changed my life! I'm still not where I want to be but I am far better at accepting that this is where I am now, and that is okay.