On making do

It's a fine line between acceptance and complacency

The other day I bought a bathroom cabinet, and it has unlocked a level of hitherto unexamined psychological insight that I find, frankly, unsettling.

But, let’s back up. I have lived in this apartment for ten years. It’s a nice apartment – a lot nicer than the one I lived in before this one, for twelve years, a dark one-bedroom that for the last 18 months of habitation I shared with my more nocturnal roommate, who would sleep on the sofa until I went to work in the morning and then relocate to the bed. “Shift!” we would call out to each other, like flight attendants working alternate routes.

Is that embarrassing? Weird? What can I say; we were broke. 

Anyway. I fell in love with this apartment when I first saw it in 2012. On the second floor, with huge east-facing windows, it gets tons of light. It has a huge yard, a washer and dryer, a finished attic with heaps of storage, one and half bathrooms, and two whole bedrooms. I was so bowled over by all of this that I was happy to overlook the off-kilter floors, the wiggly bannister, the cracked kitchen linoleum, and the absence of any bathroom storage. 

For ten years I stuck the towels in the hall and the toilet paper on the floor and called it good. 

And then Paul moved in and, taking the measure of things, said mildly, “We could put a cabinet there.”

One trip to IKEA later, voila. A narrow, gleaming white fiberboard-and-melamine monolith rises from the spot where the TP once crouched. I watched, in awe and shame, as it was assembled. 

“Ten years I’ve lived here and it never once occurred to me that I could go to a store and purchase something that would make this bathroom more functional,” I marveled, as we stashed the TP and the epsom salts and the extra chemo mouthwash and the beard trimmer and the Cetaphil and the plastic bags for the kitty litter all inside their tidy new home. “What is wrong with me?”

What I had told myself, for years, was that it was fine. It was all fine, having the TP in a heap on the floor. And even if I did have, sometimes, an extra $120 to spend on an IKEA cabinet, the memory of being flat broke is hardwired and, besides, I don’t want to participate in the disposable, materialist big box store economy anyway. If I can’t get it at the thrift store I’d rather do without.

That’s what I told myself but I had to admit this cabinet was nice, even if we had put in the backing piece backwards, so that the bright white faced the wall and the drab gray faced the interior of the unit. And it made me feel better and like I had some agency in shaping my environment and, by extension, my life at a moment when that is feeling a little shaky.

Talking to a friend, I extrapolated from this cabinet epiphany to my experience thus far of cancer treatment. Because, so far, everything has been fine. I mean it is cancer and chemo and it is shitty and no fun – but the treatment itself has been fine. I went and got a mammogram at the first place that could fit me in, which happened to be in the suburbs, and then I toddled off for the secondary and tertiary testing where I was sent, to the doctors in that network, and I never got a second opinion. I didn’t shop around for the best oncologist, look on medical Yelp or whatever for reviews of breast surgeons. I just sent my info to my brother-in-law, who is a dermatologist, so close enough, and he maybe asked a colleague (?) and then came back and said,”Yep, it looks like they know what they are doing.” It was all covered by my insurance – amazingly, miraculously – and that was good enough for me because, see above about being flat broke for a long time.

Other friends, in their having of breast cancer, have consulted with multiple doctors, read all the research to game out the best possible outcome. Explored alternative therapies. What is wrong with me? Don’t I want the best?

I may have told myself, “Who am I to think I know better? To think that I am the exception to some very standard rule?” Breast cancer is so commonplace and so finely diagnosable as to have well established treatment protocols. Did I really think I had a better idea?

Or, maybe I just don’t want having breast cancer to be my full-time job. I have a full-time job already, and then some. Did I really have time to run around doctor shopping? I mean, also, I am kind of lazy.

But the truth, I think, is less sassy. While there is a great deal to recommend the practice of acceptance, and the ability – honed through years of fixing up thrift store furniture – to make do with what you’ve got, it’s a fine line between acceptance and complacency and I fear of late I am falling on the far side of that line more often than I’d like. 

Because despite my best efforts, and years of therapy, there’s still that voice in my head, the one that says it really doesn’t matter if I make an effort. It won’t make a difference if I clean the bathtub, find a clinical trial, go to that protest, sign that petition, write that congressperson. The forces of decay and destruction are too strong. I don’t like this voice; I think it’s wrong, but it’s gotten louder since the pandemic, something I’m only recently able to admit to myself. 

What helps to shush that voice (and, hopefully, clean the bathtub) are the bracing voices of others with more backbone than myself. Voices like the young(er) journalists I’m lucky enough to still work with at South Side Weekly, where – in my off hours – I’ve been helping put together this year’s Best of the South Side issue. Voices of other writers like my friend Millicent Souris, whose own newsletter (Attitude Adjustment Facility) is so so good, a blistering call to political accountability, not this noodling around about dumb cancer. Sometimes, I do manage to find my agency: like when, at the beginning of all this, I called out a creepy bone scan tech for asking — as I lay in the scanner, immobilized — if I liked to be tied up. (Dude. Inappropriate!)

When I get off my ass, speak up, and apply myself, try to change a situation, I always feel better. I very much don’t like that being sick and more isolated right now is making it harder to do just that. But I’m going to keep trying, one cabinet at a time.

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That’s all I’ve got this week. Thanks to everyone who sent reading recommendations after the last newsletter. I’m still plowing through The Emperor of all Maladies, which is really good and, honestly, a page turner it’s just sooooo long. After that I’m going to turn to something lighter maybe. I did take a break this week and read Elizabeth Crane’s This Story Will Change, which is a quick and fun read – if reading about heartbreak and marital betrayal is your idea of fun. It’s been an odd experience getting married in midlife just as a mini-flood of books about midlife marriage and its challenges and collapses have hit the market. I was heartened to see that, upon hearing I was a newlywed, Betsy wrote in my copy of her book, “I still believe!” I do too. More soon.