The year cancer blew up my town

I emerged today from underneath the dark mushroom cap of my depression and fear for one reason: to vote for Elizabeth Warren. Even if I go tomorrow, I figured, I'd have done my part to put the future in good hands.

It had been more than 2 days inside my house, not going outside even for a short walk, even though the weather is starting to change a little toward spring. It did not seem to matter, to my darkening mind.

I am no stranger to dealing with depression and anxiety. I know way more than I wish I did about coping and about skills and how to try to avoid circling the dark hole. But here's where I was. My thinking: last year, cancer came to my town. Cancer ambushed, clobbered, bushwhack and detonated in my town. I was left alive, though trembling in my doc martens. My father was not as lucky. And we don't know that it's done with us.

And I know all the tricks of distraction, I take the maintenance drug, I take the anti-depressants and anti-anxieties, I go to the support groups. I dig into my hobbies, trying to master laminated dough (spoiler alert: these things take time), trying to learn calligraphy. I try to take comfort in nature and cycles of things and how the universe must surely crave balance. For every ebb, there is flow. A zig for every zag.

It's all I can do and I do it, but there are still times when longing and jealousy and righteous fury have their day. It's inevitable. There are days when grief reigns supreme. I guess this is part of the process, too, but I hope I find a way soon, a way to live a kind of "normal" life without pretending the spectre of recurrence isn't constantly hovering.

How do you go about your life again, how do you go back to living peacefully in your town? This feeling is common enough among former cancer patients, I know. And I'm still convinced there is something more than fear to learn from all of this. I'm just not sure how to begin again.