She wore a garbage bag to my classroom the day of the Halloween party. It was the big, heavy, black sort that shone and crinkled when she walked. None of the other parents wore costumes. Her hair was like twigs, dirty blonde with twinges of green where she’d tried to bleach it. She’d said once that when she was giving birth to Anthony, my cousin, her water broke and it was green. I pictured it the same green as those parts of her hair, the same way I could envelope my whole brain in the same kind of black shiny water as the color of that garbage bag.

There was a constant anxiety hanging heavy over my time in that house. I remember so much of it; have talked so much of it through in therapy sessions. What I missed talking through in therapy usually finds it’s way out of my mouth late night, laying in arms, a spark of a thought about a dog giving birth and eating it’s babies, or something will make me think of spending a summer in bed, writing sentences every time I broke a rule I didn’t know existed.

A few years after I lived with Dan & Gina, my aunt and uncle on my mother’s maladjusted side of the family, I was in a foster home that similarly enjoyed the Public Square style of chastising a person. They’d have the offender stand before the entire family and they would berate, list your crimes, demand that you explain yourself. I would stand there and I would stare past all of it, and I would think “I’m not here. I’m not here. These are not my toes. This carpet doesn’t exist. I am nowhere. I am nothing. These are not even my thoughts, because I have none.”

That foster family came to believe that I was possessed. They were Catholic freaks who seemed to keep finding themselves guardians of all sorts of possessed children. To hear their stories, you would think Satan was the case manager, because there is no explanation for the number of kids who came through their home who somehow became inhabited with an evil spirit.

The only spirit in me, causing me to go cool, grow still, stand for as long as I needed to in order to bypass their bullshit- outlast the madness and not be broken, was the same spirit that had learned how to endure anything.

I was seven.

My aunt used to lay me on the hardwood floors. I was seven when she started to do this. I mention that because when I think of seven year old children, I often consider the amount of misery a person would have to have within themselves in order to cause this level of sadism to be directed at a child. Once on the floor, my freckled nose pointed toward a plaster crack, she would put a shirt into my mouth. Then she would take the buckets used to fill up the fish tanks, dirty plastic, heavy buckets, and she would pour the water slowly over my face, and it was like I was drowning.

You don’t die from most things, and some things you wish you would. I can recall panic attacks as an adult where the loudest though in my head was “Enough! Just stop living already so that this can be done.” And a panic attack, that’s within yourself. You have to grab yourself by the arm, make yourself breath, relax, be okay. Or, you could just take a xanax. But another person isn’t within you, and you can’t grab them by the arm when you’re seven and their arms are that far above you.

When I was 21 my aunt and uncle found me. They called me and we small talked about my cousins, about the house, about my kids. And then my uncle got me on the phone alone and told me about Vietnam and being a prisoner of war. He talked about the tortures he endured, and how those things stay with a person, making it impossible to ever really come back from that.

For over a year the punishments continued, increased, got more intense. There were beatings with a leather razor strop, there were mental games, making me dress in a diaper and goo-goo gaga and drink from a baby bottle in front of the neighbor boy I had a crush on, there were more instances of water boarding, there were three days of making me stand in a corner, kicking me when I’d fall over from exhaustion.

And I remember that time in shades of green and in black, and I remember hiding in the bathroom, overdosing on tylenol because I had read about a kid dying from it. It did nothing. But laying there on that floor, knowing I wasn’t going to die from a thing, not knowing the word torture as it applied to my uncle and his war, only knowing that this would not kill me,I knew that in order to not break completely, I had to do something. I found a way to stare until I didn’t exist, and I would think “I’m not here. There is no me. I don’t exist. I have no thoughts. None of this is real.” until I stopped thinking all together and I really didn’t exist.

The last time I talked to my aunt and uncle on the phone, my aunt said “Every time we see a news story about an abused kid, we think about what we did to you, and we’re sorry.” And I didn’t know what to do with that. I said “That’s okay.”, because what else could I say? “Well, I don’t have to see news stories to remind me. It’s always there.”?

As an adult, after years of therapy, I learned to stop disappearing myself any time I felt like things were about to get hard. I learned to be present in those moments, to accept that stressful things aren’t all going to be as terrible as the tortures endured in abuse. It’s difficult, though, because I react so strongly to every single thing that happens. I liken it to needing to cut a grapefruit when the only tool I have is a chainsaw. Every time there is any situation, no matter the size, my usual tool is so powerful that it can destroy what could be a good result.

It was an act of extreme strength that lead me to invoke the ability to meditate myself away from a thing that would have driven me mad otherwise. And lately, I have felt life testing me, have wanted to replace the sound of the doctor talking about the courses of treatment, the nurses in hasmat suits putting poison into my arms, the nights of aching, the arguments over the phone with billing departments, the fucking loneliness, with that same dark space of not existing. But I haven’t, and I won’t, because it actually takes more strength these days to be present. And I have never taken the wimpy way out before.

See, my uncle was right when he said that those things that happen stay with a person, and he was right when he said you don’t come back from that. You don’t come back; not ever. Instead, you go someplace else. It’s just that the place I chose to go has a a much better view.

I used to fear water, or rather, I used to say I feared water. I didn’t really fear it, though there was something about murky lake bottoms and fish bold enough to graze my goosefleshed legs that grossed me right out. Still, I overplayed my fear of water for years, claiming I was psychic and knew how I’d die; claiming that because my father had drowned at 21, I was afraid I’d drown as well; claiming that in a former life I had drowned myself; claiming whatever seemed most interesting while hugging my own arms and making a show of my fear.

Having moved a lot, I could reinvent fears based on convenience. Moving in the summer usually kept my fear of water at bay, with the opportunity to do hand stands in pools during the stickiest midwestern days guiding me to not only not fear water, but to be a mermaid; to lay in the bottom of pools with all of the air pushed out of my body until I was still as a stone, looking up, watching the way the sun turned into three suns through the chlorine kaleidoscope. In those cases, I always picked other things to fear- the dark, the basement, thunder, loud noises.

What was I, after all, if I had nothing to fear? Everyone seemed to fear something, and I had noticed that when they did, they were loved for it. They were loved through it. They were hugged and teased, then protected from it. If they faced their fears, they were hugged harder, even if they came out shaking.

My son, Trast, has real fears. He fears roller coasters, heights, and anything medical. He fears pain, discomfort, and seeing his own blood. And I have a hard time understanding him, because I have had very few honest fears in my life other than spiders, and not being loved, for which I would do anything.

Yesterday Tim and I went to the ocean. We drove down the Pacific Coast Highway, gathering pools of disgusting as we waited in lines of traffic so slow that I daydreamed of rollerskating past all the cars, shaking my short shorts and holding a flower. He just kept telling me to be happy, it was going to be a good day, but I couldn’t feel it yet. I’ve been so angry lately, anyway, and I wasn’t feeling down with his whole “Look at us! Tim and Nikol! Off to do whatever and be spontaneous!” idea.

And then we got to the ocean, and I can’t imagine anyone has ever not felt the way I feel when I’m next to the Pacific. I never get used to the moment of realization that I am so very small; that everything else is so very large; that I have nothing worth worrying about, as the moment I first look up at the perfect spot toward the back of the sky where you realize it seems to have no end. I imagine, had I lived in a time when people thought you could fall off the edge of the earth if you swam far enough, I would have thought, “Sure, stupids, but that’d take you only forever.”

Photo by Joshua MacLeod

When you first feel the water, standing at the edge, as the waves barely touch your toes, the first reaction is to make your way back to the towel and forget the ice water. “It’s cold because it comes all the way from Alaska.” Tim tells me this every single time we’re at the water. “Yeah, but come on! Didn’t it have time to warm up a little?” That’s how I always respond. Things with him are like that. I always know what to expect with him, and I have needed something like that in my life forever.

The waves knocked me over this time. The moon was full and the tide was especially strong. Even if you “stayed low” the water seemed intent on pulling you into it and pushing you down. I started to laugh underwater, imagining what it must have looked like to see my bald head, growing back blonde baby fuzz, one moment above water, and the next gone. I don’t suggest laughing underwater to anyone.

I sat in a shallower area, but the waves kept pushing my head back, filling my nose with salt. I thought about my teen years and my fabricated fear of water, and I thought of how, so long as I kept telling myself it was the truth, I could almost convince myself of anything. Just yesterday morning I decided that I loved doing dishes. I know that by the end of the week, I will be downright cheerful about washing them. The brain is like that. You can tell yourself anything and make you believe it.

If I think about the things I fear right now, I haven’t changed all that much. I still fear that nobody loves me. I still genuinely won’t go near a bug. And I fear being blind folded. That seriously freaks me out. But more noteable is what I don’t fear, and what I have never feared; a thing whose lack of fear has lead me to another kind of fear altogether. I don’t fear death.

Since the moment I knew I was alive I have never feared death. Through any spiritual incarnation of my beliefs, even when I believed there was a hell, I didn’t fear death. I have been near it, I have sought it, I have wondered about it, and I have never felt a moment’s fear about it.

I fear Pelham, who is only five, not having the goofy stories of times we spend together; not being around the very spirit of all that I am that makes others shake their heads.

However, like any proper egomaniac, I have feared life without me. I have feared Trast, already one of the most amazing men I know, continuing to be amazing but without our banter. I have feared Ayden and I never getting to the point where we can say “All those years of butting heads were pretty funny now that we look back on it.” I fear Pelham, who is only five, not having the goofy stories of times we spend together; not being around the very spirit of all that I am that makes others shake their heads.

And I clearly see the parties I’m not at. I clearly see the dinners I don’t cook. People are there. They are eating, happy, smiling. These are people I love, and I am not there anymore. There’s Tim, at the beach, and the water is cold. “This water is cold because it comes all the way down from Alaska.” he says. And whoever he is there with says “Oh.” And I am nowhere. But everything else, like the ocean, keeps going so far that you can’t even imagine where it ends.

I recently posted a photo to Facebook of an Aveda toning spray that was really soothing to spray on my bald head. Shortly after I posted the photo, I got a comment from Lori Dorn, a writer who has been going through cancer treatment for some time now, telling me that putting aloe onto my scalp feels good and helps the hair grow back more quickly.

At the same time, I got a message from a friend whose mother is about to start chemotherapy treatments thanking me for the tip. So, I figure, if I need to go through this, and countless other people will be going through this, why not start keeping track of some of the things that are helping me not feel so fucking terrible while I go through treatment?

Every once in a while, I’ll post one of these. And if you have any tips, please comment, or email me at NikolHasler at Gmail so I can try this stuff myself.

This week:

The problem? My head burns.

The skin feels nasty to the touch, like the skin of an elderly rhino, and it’s cold, but somehow it manages to burn at the same time.

The solution:

Spraying this stuff all over it:

The ingredients include rose water and peppermint, making it smell all sorts of pleasant and soft, too. I remember that I got this as a part of a full face care package while I was pregnant with Pelham, which does makes me wonder if I should get the cleanser and lotion as well.

The problem? My skin is itchy!

I guess it’s the radiation, which causes skin changes, especially in the areas being radiated. But some nights I finally get warm and calm enough to sleep, and then my skin starts to feel like I’m sleeping at Bed, Bug, and Beyond. (Thanks, Dan, that joke always makes me smile.)

The solution:

Okay, this one is going to need a whole lot of solutions. I’ve been trying everything. But, at least when I am in the bathtub, this stuff works really well:

Neutrogena

And it doesn’t smell strong or like someone’s grandmother’s bathroom. It’s clean and fresh smelling. And so soft and smooth. I have been using a soft sponge I got at CVS to apply it and scrub. Gentle and nice, and providing a few minutes of relief.

The problem? I’m super hungry, and super barfy.

So, the chemo makes me barf pretty frequently, which not only exhausts me, but also embarrasses me and makes me nervous about going out in public. Like, I don’t want to be person horking at The Laugh Factory. Stand up comedians are insecure enough. But the prednisone I take (the P in R-CHOP) as a part of the chemo makes me hungry and causes weight gain. Unfair, isn’t it?

The solution?

(I mean, of course, other than weed.)

Here’s what we’ve got. Miyasaka Instant Miso in Spinach flavor, Yehuda Matzo, and Command Nutrimax Banana Instant CereOats. This has become my lunch and often my dinner. Nutritionally, I get

• 240 calories
• 2 g fat
• 48 g carbs
• 11 g protein

And I also get 57% of the iron I need, which is a big deal, because all this stuff tends to make a bit anemic, and iron supplements are hard to keep down.

And now? I ask you for a tip!

My mouth has been dry and I have that super thick spit like it’s the leftover oatmeal juice in the bottom of the bowl. What’s the best way to keep my mouth un-gunked for a long period of time? Looking forward to hearing your suggestions.