We Can Dance Even When It Rains
This year has been a year of me learning how to take better care of myself. I wish that every conversation that I could have, every interaction and engagement about it could feel as life affirming and joyous as last year.
It felt like a perfect year, in a way that people don’t acknowledge a year can be perfect when you’re 57.
Perfect years don’t last forever. 25 felt like a perfect year. It was the year that I finally felt like a confident person, that I got past my insecurities. But perfect years don’t last forever. 42 felt like a perfect year, the year when I decided I could be a writer, but then, the reality of two parents with cancer kicked in when I was 43. And 57 was a perfect year, not only a year where I married my beloved Princess, but a year when I understood that the 15-year-old me that dreamed of being like Edgar Allan Poe when I grew up, would be very proud of who I am.
Perfect years don’t last forever, but life continues even when they’re through. Some years are years where you just look forward to perfect days, and this year is like that.
This year is about facing some hard facts and making sure that I have the support that I need. It’s about talking to people about who my emergency contacts are and making sure that everyone knows how to get me support if anything goes wrong. It’s about thinking that 58 is only 2 years away from 60, and I’m not actually going to live forever.
My mom was diagnosed with multiple myeloma cancer when she was 61, and even though she lived to be almost 71, she was actively fighting cancer for the last decade of her life.
This year is a year for having difficult conversations. It’s a year for making sure that my support system supports me. And I’ve been traveling on this path for a while now. It’s just that when I was 55, it looked like the start of a glorious adventure.
A glorious adventure that looks like me getting my first Bram Stoker nomination for The Rat King. A glorious adventure that looked like me getting my first ever serious Guest of Honor spot as Toastmaster at Mile High Con.
And there I was, a fighter, not understanding why I had to get pushed to the airplane in a wheelchair so many times that year. And there I was, a warrior, recovering from gallbladder surgery. Putting on post surgical weight and having more and more trouble with my feet and my knees. And there I was, on prednisone, because they didn’t know what I was having an allergic reaction too and it turned out to be my high blood pressure medication.
And there I was, pushing back and fighting and getting through every damn day, being the kind of person my brother Scott always said I was, and that’s someone who’s very determined.
And that was me, turning all that around, getting my house back together, over the past 3 years. Building a support system that I could rely on. Finding the friends that were more than fair weather. It was all work that I needed to get to where I was going.
But very determined people need support, too.
The feeling is coming back again, that essential core belief that everything’s going to be all right. It’s there through a curtain of tears, it’s there beyond the grief that I experience.
Because we can dance even when it’s raining.
Sumiko Saulson 