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To be perfectly honest, I hate the situation I’m in.

I’m dying. No matter what I do, the truth is, I’m dying. This cancer will most likely kill me, a few years down the road, maybe sooner.

I’m too young for this, I keep thinking. I go to the infusion center where people get IV Chemotherapy. Everyone in there, with a few exceptions, has grey hair or no hair. I’m definitely the youngest.

I feel myself slipping away daily. The things I used to be able to do are no longer options.

I can’t walk well. The radiation to my hip caused such pain that I had to sit and get assistance walking around the house. Now the joint is giving me problems, and I can’t seem to walk properly.

I get constant fevers.  High fevers. Fevers that break in the middle of the night and cause me to sweat over my entire body and wake up several times.

I get aches and pains.

I have no appetite. Eating is difficult and even the foods I used to enjoy make me gag. My digestion is even worse.

Amidst all of this, it’s difficult to find joy. I feel very alone, even though I know so many people are thinking and praying for me. My parents are always with me. My dad retired early so he can spend time with me.

Yet joy is hard to find. I battle with God. I ask Him, beg Him to take this lot away from me. To spare me.

But He keeps reminding me that my joy should be in the fact that He has already spared me. He has saved me from my heavy and numerous sins and the consequence of eternal death. He has done so by sacrificing His own Son in order to replace me, in order to give me something I do not deserve. Now I have eternal life, a life unlike this one of suffering.

That is where my ultimate joy should be from.

But it is so so so hard to remember this. To find reassurance. To find comfort when I am suffering so much already. I thought I would have more time. I thought maybe I’d have one more good year, where I could travel, see more of the world, learn more, graduate.

I have dreams that are crushed by the simple death sentence cancer has given me. I had dreams of getting married, of becoming a photojournalist, of having children.

God, you know my sorrow. Please grant me peace.

When there’s too much to digest, and you can’t process any of it. It’s toxic, no doubt.

But you feel better afterwards.

Unlike other worldly–or wordy–endeavors.

On Solitude:

It is good to be alone. It’s hard to enjoy it. It’s hard to avoid crossing the fine line between quiet introspection and raving lunacy when you are left alone with your thoughts.

On Sadness:

This, I feel is different from sorrow or mourning. Sadness…it’s a light sensation, far more necessary to feel than sorrow or mourning. Sadness can exist healthily and constantly without really bothering me. I can be content but sad. Happy but feel the sadness. I’ve come to accept that it needs to be accepted as a part of my personality. Without the sadness, I lose much of my inspiration. Though my inspiration rarely results in much good. Nevertheless, without the sadness, I don’t think. I’d be to happy, and empty to do so. In my sadness, then, is my fullness. Not happiness, but fullness, and contentment. There is a certain clarity to sadness that happiness or any other emotion fails to deliver.

On Self-Awareness:

That sadness is necessary to my self-awareness. The sadness, however, is often a result of my frustration that I cannot ever fully possibly be self-aware. By self-awareness I refer to a certain fullness of understanding of oneself, of myself. I cannot know myself. This makes knowing others much more complicated, because others find the same difficulty of negotiating themselves. Therefore our otherness is hopelessly incommunicable because of our inability to know ourselves.

Temet nosce–I think this is essentially what we strive for.

And yet…

On God:

Simultaneous to our desire to understand ourselves and our subsequent inability, I feel that we strive for something beyond ourselves, the ultimate Other. This is the only key to understanding ourselves. We are innately selfish, so naturally, to create a design that causes us to look beyond ourselves for a selfish reason is ingenious. God. If we seek the one who has the answers, or rather The Answer, who created and modeled us after Himself, we will find, through Him, ourselves.

On Self-loathing:

And yet when we come to terms through Him about ourselves, we find ourselves still not fully self-aware, but aware enough to know that the self is something that must be detested. The old-self vs. new-self mentality. The old-self is that which we love, and hate. Something that we cling to. Rather, that I cling to. I love my old-self. I’m scared to let my old-self go. And yet it is something to despise, something that I feel guilty placing my affection upon. My old-self worships itself. I worship it. But it is wrong. But as long as I cling to it, I will have to hate myself, and hate the One who revealed this truth to me, the truth about myself. Not that self-loathing is suicidal. It desires to change the old-self but loves it too much to want to change. And the true-self, which is the negotiation between the old-self and new-self, must choose between the two, because there is no happy negotiation. There is always a give and more take than give. The change requires something the old-self is unwilling to give up. This is sin. This is habit, the habit of sin. It’s too hard to change. And yet because of this, the true-self will always loathe both selves.

On Solutions:

Si yo puedo. If I can. The big IF I will find it, IF I can do it. So hard to execute it.  IF I will. IF I want.

Too hard to digest.

Perhaps my change requires something very ridiculous to happen that I have been wishing to happen.

Just saw the latest movie.

Films are very telling of our times.

In the past, Indiana Jones flicks were all about relics, religion, legends, and lots and lots of ancient rich cultural (possible) history, plenty of dusting off artifacts, and looking things up in books.

And now what culture (and Jones) has boiled down to is one thing:

Knowledge.

Knowledge is our new God.

Knowledge is our new Gold.

Read here.