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<\/a><\/p>\nOf the many kindnesses bestowed on me during my cancer detour last year, one stands out. My friend Mary, also a therapist who aspires to write, brought me a small aqua book with \u201cONE LINE A DAY\u201d embossed in gold letters on the cover.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis way you won\u2019t be overwhelmed by the blank page,\u201d Mary said.<\/p>\n
We had often commiserated over our tortured relationship with writing: our avoidance of it, the ways in which life intervenes, how hard it is to find just the right groove between feelings so raw they burn a hole through the page and one\u2019s psyche versus feelings so repressed our attempts to capture them in words are devoid of life. We shared feelings of fraudulence, futility, fatigue. We knew the misery and mercy of dinner to be shopped for and prepared, the wish to turn off the computer and drown ourselves in West Wing<\/em> reruns. We knew how to rally one another, to persevere with a slim thread of belief in our own gifts and dreams because the other believed so whole-heartedly in them.<\/p>\n \u201cJust one line a day,\u201d Mary continued. \u201cAnyone can do that.\u201d<\/p>\n But what jumped out at me was the volume\u2019s subtitle: \u201cA FIVE-YEAR MEMORY BOOK.\u201d<\/p>\n Five years! If Mary believed I had this kind of time ahead of me, I could begin to retrieve myself from the choking fear that cancer evokes of being dead and buried.<\/p>\n Since then I\u2019ve written every evening in my aqua book. Mostly just mundane stuff\u2014how my neuropathy rated on a scale of 1-5; Obama\u2019s poll numbers; the little things I\u2019d accomplished (or not) that day. There really wasn\u2019t enough space to go any further than that. But restriction brings freedom, as my yoga teacher always reminds us when she urges us to open up a little more space by breathing through a constricted pose. The same is true of writing\u2014being confined to a line a day freed up space to write more than I\u2019ve written in a long while. The foreshortened time cancer threatened also brought an urgency that freed my mind from neurotic clutter.<\/p>\n And so I have lived, a line a day, breathing in each new morning, writing it out each night. \u201cFive Years\u201d permitted me to envision a future I feared I might not have.<\/p>\n Last night I closed out Year One. Tonight I begin in the second spot on the page for October 29.<\/p>\n Year Two. And then more to come. What a gift.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Of the many kindnesses bestowed on me during my cancer detour last year, one stands out. My friend Mary, also a therapist who aspires to write, brought me a small aqua book with \u201cONE LINE A DAY\u201d embossed in gold … Continue reading