Pocket Change: Just Keep Going

On the Origins of Pocket Change, Writing, and the Doorway to Permission

A friend of mine (a painter whose work and spirit I admire very much) recently asked me whether my writing practice is complicating my desire to draw and paint or complimenting it; whether these different parts of my artistic practice help or hinder each other. I found the question insightful and direct, and I appreciated that she asked. Since then I have continued considering the question, adding new layers of answers for myself. In doing so, I realized that it has been exactly a year since I started sharing essays and poems here on Pocket Change. The decision to make my writing public, and to keep writing, was a formative moment in my creative life.

At the end of the summer of 2023, I was nearly six months into a grueling chemotherapy schedule, waiting for my battered white blood cells to rebound so I might receive one or two more infusions of medicine. One of cancer’s twisted pranks is how it makes you long for things you never would have dreamed of wanting, such as another round of chemo.

Since the spring of that year, I had haltingly progressed from phase one of my planned treatments–relentless weekly infusions, to phase two-less frequent infusions of an even more potent drug, ominously nicknamed “the red devil.” I remember hesitating to ask my infusion nurses why the medicine had earned such a nickname, unsure if I really wanted to know the answer. The name, they told me, came from the medicine’s syrupy crimson hue, and its particular, well-known veracity.

The red devil took on the shape and exaggerated features of a deranged cartoon monster in my mind as I anticipated the first treatment. Here was another dark joke brought to me by cancer: a tool meant to eradicate my body’s misbehaving cells was strong enough to be threatening itself. The disease had a knack for keeping me pinned squarely between difficult options, often without any choice.

By late August I had completed the second of four red devil treatments. These two infusions completely and utterly leveled me. In the days following treatment, I existed mostly in my bed, weighed down by the medicine as it moved through my body. Luckily, from my bedroom window, I have a view of Lake Michigan, framed by gently arched boughs of cedar, hemlock, oak and birch.

Through the lacy aperture of those old trees whose mighty roots grasp at the bluff’s edge, I watched the big, open water every day with ardor and fascination. From there, I could see rosy light shift across the backyard, turning velvety olive moss into dappled pools of neon green. My doctors forbade swimming, but from the bedroom, I could take in my daughters’ free laughter as they jumped into the lake, floating and diving. I could hear their giddy shrieking cut through the waves’ pulse, and my husband’s voice calling them in for bedtime. I could watch hunting gulls shoot high across skies uninterrupted by clouds. And when the sun finally started to dip low late in the summer evening, I could hear the kids’ voices draw closer to the house. I could imagine them standing by the porch, wet hair licking their backs, holding their beach towels as they rinsed sand from their feet with the old green hose.

The bedroom’s interior likewise became intimately, grotesquely familiar. I knew the dented spot in the drywall directly across from the foot of the bed. Dust gathered in visible fuzz on the philodendron’s leaves. A quadrilateral swath of pink light hit the outer edge of the dresser just before dusk bled the sky each evening, casting Mattisian plant-shaped shadows up the wall. When I blinked, the knobby legs of a vintage desk in the corner that we had collected at an estate sale two years earlier was burned into the back of my eyelids. Even the most mundane parts of life were heightened and dulled in an inexplicable, confounding way.

In those days, I was mystified by a new kind of total depletion pulling me down. The contrast between interior and exterior worlds was harsh and painful. Inside, my own dreadful state was fused with the room’s static physicality; outside was freedom, light, and summer’s flaunting vitality. Inside, my thoughts reverberated off the walls and back at me. Outside, playing on repeat, was the film and soundtrack that made me want to try to stay alive.

About a week or so after each treatment, the muddle slowly dissipated. I sensed the air in contact with my skin again, as if the cells in my body were hazily awakening from the assault they had weathered. Each time this happened, I understood that the window of relative clarity would be short. There was no way to know how long these periods would last. In a journal from this time, I wrote that I felt “a little glimpse of my former self,” and wanted “to sprint to catch her.” I knew that I would soon be back on the other side, and with all luck, advancing to the next looming cycle of medicine.

My existence was inextricable from this unrelenting pendulum swing and the constant location and dislocation of self that came with it. I was saturated with an acute sense of my impermanence, and everyone else’s. This, perhaps, is the most obvious part of enduring cancer or any life-threatening or chronic disease, and the part that is most painful and surreal to try to reconcile. It is the cold reality of life’s inescapable ephemerality made perceptible, naked and glaring; it is the window I have written about before. I was constantly, terrifyingly aware of it. And then, months later, I was terrified that I would forget it.

Shortly after my diagnosis, I had worried about how the disease would demarcate clear “before” and “after” segments of my life. Worse, I feared the very real possibility that there would be no after. When I was in the middle of it, I understood with eerie consciousness that there was no way to control the way the experience was shaping me. Every prior held notion was vulnerable to redefinition; everything was up for grabs.

As I became lost in the endless, dimly lit hallways of my illness, my compulsion to write grew. In moments of both clarity and confusion, I wrote – on bits of paper tucked into the creases of books, on my phone’s notes app in the still-dark hours of the morning, and in invisible ink in my mind. Eventually, some of these idiosyncratic spurts accumulated into shapes on paper. I honed them, sunk myself into the satisfying precision of words when I could do nothing else, and gave them names. I had never before written poems. Sometimes I shared them, and sometimes I kept them to myself.

At the end of August, a poem crystalized. I named it “Pocket Change.”

---

POCKET CHANGE

When there is no sound
except, of course
the song of muffled waves
through old window screens,
a slow drip from the kitchen sink,
breeze in cedar branches

sirens whistle in my ear
gusts move
through my sighing center,
erratic
as a moth’s stop-motion
quiver to a bulb

in a day’s time
I wind my hand
from position nine to twelve
a quarter turn
rights this horizon

a vertical seam
knitting sky to water,
now seesaws to sprawl
across the great periphery

as I come ashore
to mine,
tender and unruly,
it waits for me
papers piled
lists unmarked
books left open
feathery remnants

I spend these days
like pocket change
they burn a hole,
impossible to
save for someday

write these words
make these hands
beat this heart
hear these songs

turn this pocket inside out,
scrape along its gritty seam
in case there might be
just one more-

it can’t be empty yet

---

By the following winter, I had finished my remaining treatments and undergone bilateral mastectomy surgery. My doctors declared me cancer free. I was shell-shocked.

My ongoing treatment regimen still locked me into regular immunotherapy infusions at my local cancer center, but my hair had started to grow again and my blood cells were recovering. Two or three hours outside of the house started to feel increasingly doable, but frustratingly exhausting. Much of my life as I had known it before cancer still felt distant and unreachable, even though I was on my way to recovery.

During this time, I made a promise to myself to keep writing, even if all I could muster was fragmented observations. My pervasive sense of urgency needed to be channeled. I had the sense that just as important as the writing itself, was the habit of extracting rapid-fire thoughts from my brain and doing something with them, rather than letting them evaporate.

In a particular bout of restless boldness (and perhaps, to double down on my promise), I decided to go one step further – to share my work in an offshoot of my newsletter, Constellations. In the process, I reread my poems, including “Pocket Change,” for the first time in months. The poem struck me as enduringly emblematic of my experience, and how it felt to be thrust back into life’s rushing stream after being violently plucked from it. Pocket Change seemed like an apt name for this new place for my writing.

In this phase, questions were swirling. What new shape has my identity taken? I am alive, but how do I live again? How much time might I have? What have I lost? What if this was the last thing I ever make? How will my children and my loved ones know me from these artifacts I leave behind? Writing was a crack where I could find my way into these immense, existential questions. I remembered how the practice had bolstered my courage, especially when the process felt pointless, strange or dark. The attempt to put words on my experiences felt like a smidgen of agency retained and guarded for myself, locked away from cancer’s greedy claws. And for the first time, possibly ever, I did not look away.

In writing I could pose my many questions. How would all the former versions of myself meet this new, shifting one? What was I knowingly or unknowingly omitting? I worried about writing about cancer too much, and not writing about it enough. Would this illness singularly shape my perspective from now on? And anyway, do we choose which parts of our identity to include in our stories of ourselves or are they just there, indelibly part of us and what we make?

The questions found resolution in the act of writing itself, regardless of whether I tried to answer them literally. Writing became one place that was still mine, where I could try to find the scattered pieces of myself. The fact that essays and poems emerged from the darkest time in my life—and that they kept coming—surprised me. I felt like an imposter, and nearly always still do when I write.

In my cruel, self-loathing moments, I mock myself. The voice of a condescending reporter emerges in my consciousness, announcing with sarcasm, “middle aged cancer patient finds poetry and writing therapeutic.” In my more generous moments, I understand that this impulse, filtered through the sieve of my experience, connects me to the same swell of human experience that has inspired creative expression since the beginning of time. I remind myself that nothing is more human than the instinct to locate oneself; the search for meaning amid chaos and suffering; the attempt to link language, image, color or sound to all the mysteries of existence.

When I started Pocket Change, the only conscious decision I made was to open the door to keep going. Creating space for the unknown possibility of it all was essential to recovering my purpose. Allowing it to unfold was a palpable antidote to grief and despair.

I was writing to find out what cancer had opened and broken in me, how it had changed how I see, well—practically everything. Louise Glück wrote in her 2022 essay “Writing as Transformation,” “In the great physical events, extreme bodily pleasure and extreme bodily suffering, the self disappears completely or is lost. Either way, an involuntary act, unlike the struggle to be, to exist, that underlies the need to write.” Perhaps, I was writing to find out if I still existed.

Giving myself permission to write translated to other forms of permission that I am just beginning to understand. I sense a new capacity to take my questions into the process instead of trying to answer them with it. For the first time in fifteen years I have an intense desire to paint the images that have been playing in my mind for so long. Writing helps me look directly into the hard, weird, surprising, surreal, unanswerable aspects of my life; it makes sense that I might look at painting, drawing and making things with my hands differently now, too.

My instinct tells me that writing and painting are opening a gateway to one another. Theirs is a symbiotic relationship that, with all good fortune, will continue to provide me with a long lifetime of exploration.

I am, most thankfully, free now from cancer’s most acute grip. I am getting stronger with each passing day. There is no way to know how long this will last for me, or for any of us – a reality that is as true now as it was when I wrote the poem “Pocket Change.” My hope is that with growing distance from the storm, I will still be able to dial into the same frequency I heard so clearly when I was in its apex.

I want more than anything to sharply heed the parts of me that gather words and images–to write them, draw them, and uncover them from shadows. It appears there is no turning back.