The past few months have been discouraging. Bad teaching and not much writing are not what I was hired to do. Frustration and guilt are constant companions. I wonder sometimes what it feels like to deal with cancer and chronic pain without a job. On the one hand, it would be a great gift not to feel that omnipresent guilt about badly taught classes and unproductive months. On the other hand, were work absent, pain and disease would fill my mind; nothing would be left to elbow them aside. I can think of few worse hells than that. Which makes me wonder at this fact: the large majority of chemo patients I’ve seen at Yawkey (the Boston cancer center where I go) are well past retirement age. As badly as I do my job these days, I’m more thankful for it than I have words to express.
Link to Work