El Cóndor Pasa

A state of the Healings union, some Simon & Garfunkel, and Pema Chödrön.

Is it me or is Art looking at Simon like the girl from the distracted boyfriend meme?

Hello again. So it turns out that for all its faults, this platform does a pretty good job ginning up traffic for its participants’ work, and as a result the readership for this newsletter grew by about 15% over the three-month period when I wasn’t posting. I suppose that’s good, even if it does have a weird, make-money-while-you-sleep feel to it.

But since there are a number of new folks here, and since we’re still finding our sea legs post-hiatus, and since, I’ll be honest, it would probably be both constructive from a project standpoint and therapeutic from a personal one, I thought we might do a recap of sorts, like one of those YouTubes you watch before starting a new season of a zesty TV show. Is this the best way to welcome new readers? Probably not. Am I self-conscious that this is going to come off like an extended bit of throat-clearing, a way to postpone figuring out what to write about and defining this newsletter’s second phase? Yes, for sure. But I figure this is just the ride we’re all on. Maybe we’ll never figure that out! Maybe it’ll be nothing but throat-clearing from here on in. And maybe it won’t even matter because this platform will just keep sending new subscribers regardless of what or even if I post. I mean, hell, we’re all just shouting into the void at this point anyway, right? 

Right. So then, a Healings recap. Let’s do it. This all started with an ambulance ride. Well, it started when I initially took myself to the ER for stomach pain and was then hospitalized with a cauliflower-sized cluster of “masses” in my abdomen and subsequently diagnosed with cancer, specifically non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma (NHL). But the idea of starting a Substack to write about that experience crystalized after we had to call 911 following complications arising from my first chemotherapy treatment. Back last June, when I started posting, we really didn’t know what was going to happen. NHL is generally treatable but there are no guarantees, and it’s rare, according to my oncologist, for chemo to fuck a person up within an inch of his life, like it did in my case. When I started writing, there was a lot of fear and uncertainty. 

At first, I just wanted to chronicle everything—the ambulance ride, how I was diagnosed, what chemo was like, etc. I thought it might be helpful to anyone else going through something similar. I also interviewed other cancer survivors, figuring their perspectives would be helpful as well. During this time, I was doing deep dives into the history of cancer treatment, learning as much as my chemo-addled brain could absorb. For a while, the editorial vision for Healings seemed clear enough: to create an archive of information, most of it relayed as first-hand experience, for anyone else unlucky enough to have to go through a serious illness. The quote I appended at the end of each newsletter from Susan Sontag, who battled both breast cancer and leukemia, ultimately succumbing to the latter, summed it up nicely: “Illness is the night side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.” 

Yeah, dawg. 

But longtime readers (hi mom) will know this is only half the story. Because just a few weeks before I was diagnosed, my wife and I had learned we were pregnant, following two difficult years of trying that included a recent and heartbreaking miscarriage. And so the cancer and pregnancy became entwined, leading to some very heavy experiences, such as going in for our 12-week ultrasound with me in a morphine-induced fog, cancer chewing up my gut as we nervously waited for the doctor to tell us whether or not the pregnancy was viable, as meanwhile my chemo was due to start within a week. So everything was very harrowing and full of portent, and as someone inclined to process these kinds of things through writing, it made sense to try to transform it all into something useful.

And maybe I did or maybe I didn’t. But what’s interesting in terms of the trajectory of all this is that slowly but surely I got better—the chemo did its job, the cancer abated—and slowly but surely the pregnancy advanced. And as things started to level out for me healthwise and I related several (tho not all) of the gnarliest stories from this period, and as anticipation started to build around bringing a new life into this world, I found myself increasingly doing things like writing about my own personal conception of spirituality, so much so that I even wrote about being self-conscious of doing just that. Another thing I became low-key obsessed with was a serious aversion to wellness culture—to the broad societal obsession with lifehacks and pseudoscience, which you come face to face with when you have something like cancer, because suddenly everyone has a friend from work or an uncle who ran an ultramarathon and instead of chemo they drank sloth sweat and have been cancer-free ever since. I’m joking, but only slightly: The allure of alternative therapies was so strong it may have cost Steve Jobs his life, to use just one example.

But so that was the journey we were on: cancer and chemo and the whole pregnancy roller coaster all braided together, as in for example the fact that Danielle and I were not allowed to sleep in the same bed or use the same bathroom for three days following each dose of chemo, lest any of the poisonous chemicals they injected me with somehow leach out in my bodily fluids and harm our unborn child.   

And where this all wrapped up of course was with the inevitable and blessed arrival of our baby girl last December. It ended with my cancer in remission and me emerging relatively unscathed from the whole ordeal (the semi-processed trauma of it all notwithstanding). It ended with a successful, borderline-miraculous homebirth and 10,000 tears and me and Danielle and our dogs and our baby all snuggled up in the same bed during “the golden hour,” and one of the midwives saying, After the year you guys have had, you deserved something to go right for a change, which we did, and I choke up every time I think back on this moment. 

By way of intermission, let’s listen to the song from Danielle’s birthing playlist that was playing as our daughter entered this world, submitted sans commentary: 

All right. So whether you consider it part of the end of one story or the beginning of another, the question that attends the relaunch of this newsletter is, What now? This question was easy enough to answer when I was Battling Cancer and it was therapeutic to write about that and maybe a little helpful—we did raise some money for the Patient Advocate Foundation, and possibly broadened our understanding of at least a small slice of the cancer experience. It was my first extended foray into personal online sharing, or, if you prefer, the creator economy. I learned a lot, and, ya know, it was fun.

But truth be told, I don’t fancy myself a cancer journalist, or a science writer of any kind. I’m intrigued and saddened by the dysfunction of our health-care system, but I’m not about to make covering that industry my beat. Like it or not, cancer will always be a part of my story—not least because there’s a non-zero chance it could come back—but I’m no longer interested in making it the center of my universe (or the focus of this newsletter).

And so what, then? Where, then? I have thoughts, but not an answer. I’ll probably be writing more about recovery. I’ll try not to bore you too much with posts about parenthood, but it’ll inevitably come up. I remain frustrated by the perpetrators of wellness culture and suspect I’ll take a whack at those folks at times as well. I’m determined to continue pulling on this spirituality thread and see what unspools. Occasionally, a compelling vision comes into focus for how to tie all these things together, then I lose it. I figure if I just keep plugging away, it’ll coalesce eventually. Or not. 

Here’s a quick story:

It was dumb luck that it worked out this way, but a couple weeks after our daughter was born, I started reading Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön’s When Things Fall Apart. A typical day would start with R. waking up around 5 a.m. needing to nurse, and when she was done I’d take over for a few hours so Danielle could get some more sleep. On a good morning, after some combination of burping, cuddling, bouncing, and playing, I’d get her to take a nap around the time the sun was coming up, at which point I’d pour myself a cup of coffee and read some Pema. I call this luck because I can’t imagine a better book to graze on as a new parent waking up each day in this here Anthropocene.

“We think that if we just meditated enough or jogged enough or ate perfect food, everything would be perfect,” Chödrön writes. “But from the point of view of someone who’s awake, that’s death. Seeking security and perfection, rejoicing in feeling confirmed and whole, self-contained and comfortable, is some kind of death.”

The whole book is like this—a treatise on coming to terms with a world where security is elusive and discomfort is the norm, where whomever you find yourself being in this moment is the only version of yourself that will ever exist, and that this as good as it gets, and that this is actually great news. Are these strange thoughts to delight in with a newborn sleeping next to you? They certainly didn’t strike me that way at the time. “Without giving up hope—that there’s somewhere better to be, that there’s someone better to be—we will never relax with where we are or who we are.” In that sense, I guess you could say this newsletter will be a journey in hopelessness, an exercise in unwellness. Yes, yes, I think that’s good enough for now. 

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This is the Healings Newsletter. We thank you for reading.

Healings is written by Garrett Kamps and edited by Tommy Craggs. Ayana H. Muwwakkil provides artwork.

Healings is about illness, recovery, and related topics, and began in the summer of 2023 as a chronicle of Garrett’s battle with cancer. We make no guarantees that it will hold together, thematically speaking, in the months to come.

Healings is free for all at the moment. Paid subscriptions are currently paused but we plan to turn them back on pretty soon.

If you have a suggestion for a story, would like to contribute, or want to chat with Garrett for any reason whatsoever, reach out: healingsproject@gmail.com.

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If you’re welling to give up hope that insecurity and pain can be exterminated, then we can have the courage to relax with the groundlessness of our situation. This is the first step on the path. — Pema Chödrön