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It’s July. I’m moving in exactly one month, and I’m on a weeklong break from work to recover from the revision surgery I had on Thursday to finally release the scar tissue that has bound my left arm and pectoral muscle for the past eighteen months. I am happy to report that, even as I sit here with a drain pulling serous fluid from the cavity left in my breast, I can tell that it did the trick. At last, after more occupational therapy than I can remember, none of which really worked, I can move my arm with a range of motion that feels, in truth, a miracle.
Range of motion has been both the reality of the physical challenge of life after cancer and the metaphor I’ve been working with to explore how aging in general and breast cancer in particular has brought me back to my body. To a renewed understanding of the damage it has suffered over the years, whether inflicted by myself, medicine, or predatory men, and to the possibilities unlocked by returning and recommitting to a dance and movement practice, to learning again to take up space.
As this newsletter (hopefully please) evolves beyond a chronicle of cancer treatment, I think it’s time for a reboot — and a new name. I’m pretty allergic to branding, but I have to concede that a new name will better communicate to readers what this project is all about. I’m taking the rest of the month and then some off to move, but I’ll be back in August as “Range of Motion,” with a renewed focus on all that rubric might encompass.
In the coming weeks, in between packing and doctors appointments, I’m also working through the contributions to SO DIFFERENT NOW, the essay collection on Sinéad O’Connor that I am coediting with Sonya Huber, and that will be out next year from One Signal Books. Based on the work I have seen so far, this book is going to be amazing. I am humbled and inspired daily as I read through this set of searching, vulnerable, furious essays, and I’m reminded of our subject’s commitment to truth and justice, which came at great personal cost.
The world continues to terrify, and election season looms. I don’t have many words of wisdom to help anyone navigate what is an increasingly bleak situation. When I engage, I wind up mangled by despair. These essays on Sinéad are helping to ground me and to keep my moral compass in line. So I thought I’d share this piece I wrote eight years ago, after I traveled to Cleveland for the 2016 Republican National Convention and tried to make sense of the scarring that encounter left. Reading it now, I am again reminded how important it is to leverage the privilege I have to keep working for safety, for joy, and for peace.
LOVE the new name
A beautiful new name to honor all this transformation, the ugly and the soft. Sending you ease in your move too ✨🏡