this hermit life is safe but no good for poetry

so yeah, I’m literally having surgery in three weeks and trying to work through some writing projects, and yet I’m STILL procrastinating on them. Whyyyyy? Also sorry for getting Hamilton stuck in your head lol. Also, even though it's not totally effective, 10/10 would recommend deleting TikTok.

So...is this how I tell YWS I (probably) have kidney cancer? Um...yeah, I guess so. Kind of fitting, really. So, long story short, I was getting chronic UTIs, the most recent one led to a kidney ultrasound which found an "unknown mass," got an MRI to get a better look at this mass and...it's a cyst. But there's different kinds of kidney cysts on a scale from Bosniak 1 aka "don't even worry about it, bro" to Bosniak IV aka "um actually that's funky looking and we should probably cut it out." I...actually have one of each, but the surgery is for the latter one. It has an 80% chance of being malignant, but it's small/early stage/not in the middle of the kidney, so getting the partial nephrectomy surgery should get rid of it. So...that's now scheduled for April 23. And I have a lot of feelings about it.

This one is in the "felt personal, might delete later," category. But...yeah, there was a point in grad school where I was on Facebook and some distant acquaintance was recovering from some kind of cancer (idk the details aren't important.) And I was...not jealous, exactly, but thinking like "man, it would be great to just...check out of life for a while." Not like dying, but more like I wanted someone to say 'hey it's okay if you're not accomplishing XYZ, you're alive and isn't that great?" And I recently went through some old notes from my psychiatrist at the time, and there were multiple references to me wishing I was "sick enough" to just leave grad school. Which I wanted to, but my mom thought I'd just never get a job if I didn't (that was a particularly juicy detail I forgot.) So...yeah, that's a trip.

Title from Halsey's "Letter to God" interludes on "The Great Impersonator." Which are like unfairly good for album interludes.

Please don't ask me why I'm rhyming so much. It just...felt right, okay?

But yeah, this is 100% based on a true story. I left school with a giant manila folder of my psychiatrist's notes from those years. This isn't technically the first time I've gone through them since then, but it's generally a Bad Time so I don't. But fast forward to about a month ago when I got the confirmation of the bad cyst. I mentally rewound back to around 2014 when I was having early signs of kidney problems due to lithium (which we eventually stopped in part because of this.) So I wanted a somewhat fresh accounting of all of that to tell the urologist in case it's relevant to what's happening now (his conclusion is likely not, but possibly). So...in I went. And like man, I could just FEEL my misery emanating from the page, even secondhand from my doctor's notes. I did get the info I needed (basically there was some signs of renal tubular acidosis, which is when your kidney forgets how to regulate blood pH, basically, but they were just kind of watching it and waiting to see if it caused actual problems, which it did not), but...man, it did not put me in a good headspace. I'm doing so much better these days that it's easy for me to look back and be like "oh my god why did it take you so long to leave?"

so yeah, this is about an actual thing that keeps happening where I horribly misjudge how my readers are going to react to a thing that is happening in my story. Like maybe I wrote a character to be a little bit of a jerk, but they're reacting like he murdered puppies or something. Or I wrote something that was meant to be silly, but the readers are like "um that's actually super dark." Is this a "neurodivergent has no idea how Actual Humans react to things" problem? Or just a "novice writer has no idea what they're doing" problem? Idk but I wrote this poem about it.

I'm always a fan of your napo threads nite - and have enjoyed reading along with these first pieces.

In "Why can’t I write like I’m running out of time?" -

These words were once my lifeline,
The way I made meaning
From a meaningless world.

I certainly resonate with the angst / frustration of not being able to find poetry, when previously it felt like words came a lot more easily - and then the added frustration of the other things that fill our time that we don't want to!


--
"This is a poem about kidneys"

Broken kidneys don’t inspire
Like broken hearts and minds
(though, in a cruel twist,
the pills that fixed my mind
might have caused this.)

<3 This one certainly packs a punch. I'm really sorry you're going through this!
Your poem brings to mind the "outwardly still functioning" illnesses / burdens that people kind of gloss over with no clue of the internal happenings. There's so much we don't know about bodies and people.

--

I’d been driving through the fog
So long, I thought there was no end.

This imagery in particular (and the whole poem) is very poignant.

I'm doing so much better these days that it's easy for me to look back and be like "oh my god why did it take you so long to leave?"

<333 I def resonate with the reading into past-self stuff, and it feeling almost like a stranger. But glad you're in a better spot now.

Thanks for sharing your poems nite! Wishing you strength with these health hurdles and surgery!

Such a saddening yet empowering thread to read through.. I'm sorry for all you're dealing with in life, niteowl. I can't imagine the pain it must be. I've always known your works to be incredibly grounded and of a very understandable and easily appreciable language. Though I can't say I relate to the specifics of the work, the feelings are very much getting across the screen. The idea of having a serious illness and yet not being able to replicate that urgency or worry is indeed a difficult experience. The lack of gratitude before something bad happens in life was a relatable aspect, but fit to the precise theme rather well.

If you’re praying to be sick
Then something has to change.

So sharp, I realise why these lines needed to be targeting. Aching but beautiful <3

The emotions revolving around a health issue were so well done. I get that living it makes it easy, but it still requires incredible skill you obviously have.

and i wonder how
i understand hearts so little
for one who made an identity
out of dissecting her own

Can't compliment this part enough.

(though, in a cruel twist,
the pills that fixed my mind
might have caused this.)

And that is poetic enough, my friend! =)

May your surgery go well and health improve exponentially. I'll pray, if only for the selfish intention of you being completely healthy to write countless more of these wonderful works with no latent worry.

@alliyah-thank you for the comments and kind words! "Your poem brings to mind the "outwardly still functioning" illnesses / burdens that people kind of gloss over with no clue of the internal happenings. There's so much we don't know about bodies and people." So true! I'm doing relatively well day-to-day, which almost makes the surgery seem worse, because it will definitely be worse for me in the short term, even if I know this is better than waiting to see if the cyst gets bigger (which was also an option but the doc recommended surgery.)

@AlexWrites thank you! I am somewhat exaggerating things for poetic effect (I am not actually "wasting away in pain," for example) but it's still not the most fun thing I've ever done.

you'd think going through surgery
might inspire some self-compassion,
some praise for the resilience
of recovery from being cut open,
some awe at how the body
can walk and talk and piss
without you thinking of it at all.

but alas,
i see only dark bruises on the right side,
an unsightly rorschach test
of "wow i'm alive" or "wow i'm still
ugly." the belly of lumps and bumps
now feels heavier than before,
a mass that must be moved around
and gently washed and not looked at too much.

guys the good omens finale is coming out tomorrow and I’m not normal about it.

lol I think this is the third year in a row I’ve written a poem along the lines of “sorry I’m not writing poems, I’m too busy making my Barbies kiss in the sandbox.” Because I’ve been writing quite a lot…just can’t share it here. and really I don’t think I’ve moved on from poems for good, but I can’t know when the poetic muse will wake up again.

You were told you would be born from a man and that you would love him. You were told you would have a life of pleasure in Eden, helping your husband name all of Creation.
You were told that you would feast in a land of plenty, enjoying all the fruits of God’s labor.

You were told that you and your husband would unite in flesh, reaching levels of ecstasy that the angels would never know. You were told that you would have son after son, daughter after daughter. You were told that your heart would burst with love for them, a kind of love that angels, in their abstract bodies without the bonds of blood, could never experience. You were told that your descendants would remember you, carrying your name through the centuries.

You were told that all the beasts of Eden would befriend you. You were told that an angel would give you a gift at the gates of paradise.

None of this was a lie.

You weren’t told that your time in Eden would be brief. That a beast (or, more accurately, a demon disguised as a beast) would lead you to the last fruit of Eden that you would eat. You weren’t told that when you bit into it, you would see all of humanity, the millennia that your descendents would roam the earth, rising and falling and rising again until all was engulfed in flames. You weren’t told how good your descendants could truly be, nor how evil. You weren’t told that this knowledge would make God cast you out, your lifespan reduced from eternity to decades. You weren’t told the body you were given would wither with age until it failed, returning you to the angels.

You weren’t told that the angel’s gift would feel like salt in the wound, even as it kept you and your husband alive. You weren’t told that birthing your sons and daughters would make you scream in agony, a pain even demons could not know. You weren’t told that even after birth tore you apart, you would still long for your husband, that making love was the closest to Eden you’d ever be again. You weren’t told that one son would kill another to earn God’s favor, that you would weep and weep and weep, but no amount of tears would stop the bloodshed. Your sons would fight and your daughters weep, and their sons would fight and their daughters weep, and so it would continue ad nauseum through the centuries.

You weren’t told the reason your children would whisper your name to their own children, a game of blame, an attempt to understand why God let bad things happen. Eve knew better, and she did it anyway, and now we pay the price.

wrote this for a GO writing prompt “before the beginning”. Technically GO but this part stands on its own I think.