Just lately – well effectively since being diagnosed with cancer again and having to wait what seems like an eternity to go for my surgery – I have been acutely aware of the changes I’ve encountered over the years in my sense of who I am and who I was.
This has often been brought into focus for me when I have revisited photos from my past life but very much more so these past few days as I have been going through my possessions in preparation for re-moving .

Walter and I decided it made sense to join households, and to investigate renting out my flat, a wee while before I got my diagnosis, and I couldn’t see any reason why the project should be put on hold.  I am needing to make what should be heartrending decisions about what to discard, what to put into temporary storage (with the scary possibility that they will still  have to go at a later date), and what of my past to take with me into my future.  However, I’m left feeling a bit numb and somewhat lacking – as though there ought to be far more emotion about making such big decisions.  Perhaps tackling moving home and starting the ‘flat project’ at the same time as facing lord knows what with the cancer, is a bit too much for my wee soul to manage .  I have been moved by the evidence of the previous me as seen in my various boxes of souvenirs,  dozens of photo albums etc., and I do jib a bit at effectively discarding what once was precious, but in general the main feeling I have is an intense impatience for it all to be over and done with.  To get my things moved, my cancer removed, my flat done and my equilibrium back.

Photos below show some boxes and bags containing my previous life,  packed ready to be collected by Marie Curie Cancer Care. 

However, on a brighter note – yesterday I came across two scraps of paper with poems I had written many years ago.  One is a wee ditty which was part of a story I made up for my first granddaughter. The other was written when I had had about two years free of epilepsy which I believed I had achieved thanks to facing fears, and I recall being sure in my own soul that they had gone forever.  A couple of years later I started very gradually to reduce my anti-convulsant drugs until by 1998 I was free of them as well as the fits, and have remained so ever since.   I feel heartened by the positivity shown in the piece.  Maybe that Susan is not so very much different to this one after all.