Hi :) I feel shy/sheepish sending this email and sharing some of my life updates after months away but better late than never! I am still alive! I am currently writing to you while watching my dog (!!!!) "hunt" a squirrel, bless her heart.

You have been here with me through my unpacking and sharing of so much heavy stuff that I feel really excited and a strong desire to share with y'all some good life things (don't worry I'll continue to write about the full spectrum of being a person, health things, all of it-you won't get any toxic good vibes only in this space, I promise. Plus there is tons of sassiness and cussing in this email, per usual).

I truly have been cocooning this fall and winter. In my last email, I said I was entering my turtle era and focusing on slowing everything down and I have done just that. After hitting a hard stop and what felt like backsliding in my recovery by August, the slowing way down and being much more present in my own life has done wonders for my recovery. I needed space to get quiet to do that. Instead of spending a bunch of time talking about my recovery and talking about trying to rest but not really embodying it, I took all my energy and actually lived my recovery. As Chris says to me often, "Don't talk about it, be about it" and first of all, I'm going to do both. And second of all: Don't tell me what to do!! ;) I just had to live it for a while before I could really talk about it because I've never done this before. New things can take a while before we find our footing.

My husband is still very fresh in his grief-November was the one year since his sister died, a few weeks ago was the one year since his uncle died and in a few weeks will be one year since we found my tumor. We are still very much in the picking up the pieces of our life and being with the grief.

Onto the joyful shit!!!

Joyful Life Updates

We adopted a dog!

Her name is Sage (aka Sagey Girl, Sage Girl, Princess, Baby, Sneaky Girl, Naughty Girl, My Little Horsey). Her name was Eliza at the shelter and although a great name, it was way too similar sounding to mine. So on the car ride home, we looked at her and threw around names until Chris said, "What about Sage?" And that was that.

Quick Profile:

Name: Sage Mae

Weight: 75/80 lbs

Breed: Black Lab Retriever Mix

Favorite Snack: Apples & Peanut Butter (just like mom)

Favorite Room in the House: Kitchen (best place to possibly be given scraps while mom cooks)

Person Who Does 95% of Sage's Care: Alyssa

Sage's Favorite Person: Chris (annoying to Mom)

Problematic Thing About Sage: She is in love with the neighborhood bad boy Naga (a husky) who regularly escapes his yard and chases cats and chickens. Sage loses her goddamn mind and all her manners and training when she sees him (also similar to mom in this way)

Love/Hate Relationships: with Limes (????) and Franklin the Outdoor Cat (she wants him to love her, he hates her)

We adopted her in early November after talking about it for years and I spent much of the first 6-8 weeks wondering if I was the most foolish fool that ever dared to live for adopting a dog while still recovering from brain surgery. Because let's be real, although when around he is wonderful and does so much, Chris is not around much at all because of his work schedule. So that means 95% of the care is on me. I knew this going into it, hence the years of waiting. She has been incredibly sweet from the start but I cried a lot, feeling overwhelmed by the responsibility of caring for a new living being when I still was not in the best rhythm of caring for myself! I wondered every day if I was doing a "good" job or a "bad" job and mostly Chris fussed at me to "do less" while I nodded my head knowing that was not going to happen.

But we have had her for over 3 months now and I can say that I love her. I love caring for her. I love the rhythm of our days together. We dance together when I bring out her breakfast. I train her and love watching her mind work and learn new things. We go on car rides and I take her to new places and we walk in the woods together-she loves trees just like me. We pull tarot cards together-she boops the card of her choice with her nose and she always gets good ones. Having her, caring for her and loving her has not only continued to grow and soften my heart but it has rebuilt my confidence in my ability to go out into the world and do things. I still stumble on trails and sometimes I fall over bending down to pick up her toys but I just feel joy at all I am able to do. She makes me feel more brave and I do things now I was not doing before on my own.

She's madly in love with Chris (not surprising) and loves being chased by him (same). We greet him with incredible amounts of enthusiasm when he gets home from work. Our home has held us through tremendous grief and really traumatic things this last year and a half, so having Sage has brought so much joy, laughter and play back into our house. And caring for her has helped me get very good at routine and care for myself.

We both walk a little funny at times (her from being undernourished as a little puppy and me from surgery) and we both have had body parts amputated (she had happy tail so the shelter had to remove most of her tail, leaving her with the cutest nub and I cut off my tits in 2017). We are the perfect pair! I prayed and asked Keir (my sister in law who passed November 2022) to help us find the right dog for our family and for Chris since she was a huge animal lover and I got several signs confirming Sage was our girl. The last time we saw Keir in person she was at our house in Houston and talked about how she hoped the next time she came back we had a dog. I thought of her all day when I was at the park recently and how I wished we could have been walking through these trails together. I still feel robbed of an entire future of sisterhood with her but I know her Spirit is alive and with us (especially with Chris) every day.

I graduated physical therapy!

I started going to physical therapy in October to help gain strength and mobility back, to find relief for pain I was experiencing and to work on my balance. I went consistently until early February and it was SO HARD but it helped me so much. My physical therapist was excellent and simultaneously pushed me and let me cry out of frustration when simple things were now so much harder for me. But I only cried like twice because I'm a tough little bitch and when I would fall out of things, I'd just get mad and mutter, "fuck" and do it over and over until I got it right. My PT called me a masochist, I said thank you and it takes one to know one.

The weirdest thing that happened in PT was there was an old man there rehabbing so he could get back on the golf course. He was swinging a real golf club hitting an imaginary ball and gleefully used my head to be his target for his pretend ball while I struggled through an exercise. I said to him, "What a strange thing to do, to pretend to hit me in the head when I'm here recovering from brain surgery while you practice your golf swing." So, did brain surgery make me nicer? No!! Forever life motto: If you make me uncomfortable, I'm going to make everyone squirm. I'm not a suffer in silence kinda gal. And I'm never gonna be the butt of a strangers joke when I'm not in on it with them. That man was a fool so I let him feel foolish. Highly recommend.

I have printouts with dozens of exercises that I continue to work on each week on my own. Physical therapy was so wonderful because it felt like one of the few tangible things I could measure to see that I was in fact recovering. The cognitive things can still be so strange and hard to articulate, but in PT we could measure and time things and I got to see how drastically I improved and got stronger and more physically able to do things. I also enjoyed taking myself for post PT treats each week :) The wonderful guy working at the ice cream shop and I have become quite friendly over these months.

I grill now!

I have always felt intimidated by the grill. But this summer I asked my Dad for some grilling lessons and I've been grilling back in Houston this winter. Lots of veggies & burgers. I'm grilling turkey burgers later (secret ingredient to juicy ones? Shredded sweet potato). I'm not going to psychologically dissect why and I'm sure tired gender roles are at play here but grilling on my own, making food over fire (it is a gas grill, let me live) is some empowering shit. As a bisexual woman married to a man, this feels like one of the most queer affirming things I do (judge me all you want, this is my current truth). It should be noted that I am very afraid of fire (burned at the stake in a past life perhaps) so getting the grill fired up on my own has taken months to get comfortable with and I'm still very careful. But I feel so proud every time!!

Early to Bed, Early to Rise

Sage puts herself in her crate for bedtime at 8:15 so I now put myself in bed between 8:30-9 pm. It is delicious. I am not a night owl and I don't know why I was staying up later for all these years? Chris wakes up at the ass crack of dawn (actually in total darkness 99% of the time) for work and so it was not like he was staying up late and we were hanging out. And now because I pass out by 9:30, I get up early. And I have the quiet and still of the morning. I do yin yoga, I make simmer pots on the stove so the house smells like oranges and cinnamon. I slowly putter about taking care of things around the house, I workout, I eat breakfast-all before 8 am. I love it. I am 70 years old inside and I'm finally living like it.

Chris told me one of his coworkers was having a get together in a few weeks and it started at 8 pm and I gleefully said: Oh! Pass for me. I'll be getting ready for bed. *It should be noted if this was someone I liked, cared about or was important I would consider making the effort but I will not mess up my bedtime routine unless it is important!! And I love saying no! No, thank you!!! Also, let it be known that I am not saying you should go to bed early and wake up in the dark and this most certainly is NOT about being more productive yada yada. What I do believe is that you should find the rhythms that make you feel best. I am a morning person. I am not a night owl. I love being in bed early. I like the quiet of the morning. Since my surgery, mornings and early day are best for me physically and cognitively and I tend to get fatigued later in the day. So this way of living honors the needs of my brain and body.

You might be the opposite or somewhere in between. I will NOT be selling you 5 steps to creating a morning routine or why you should get up at 5 am to be the bossiest boss babe there ever was and if you see me making a get ready with me video where I set up my phone on a tripod and pretend to wake up on camera...then the brain tumor is back. Please notify Chris immediately. Just say, "Alyssa is doing weird things online. Order her a brain scan asap."

I am KILLING it at my ADLs

Activities of daily living? Check, check, check!! Most days, I am able to do all the simple daily life things that make me feel good. My left hand still gets really wonky and truly does its own thing (I'm talking dropping, tossing, spilling, shaking lol). But I'm cooking and feeding myself really delicious meals. I'm tending to my home and space so it feels like my sacred temple, breathing life and new joyful energy into it. I love my neighborhood and have gotten so friendly with many of my neighbors since I see them multiple times a day out on walks. My life is simple and small right now and it is oh so sweet.

The truth is y'all, I have lived the most wonderful life. I am positively surrounded by really supportive and wonderful people in my life, I have done really cool things professionally and gotten to support hundreds of incredible humans, and I just have really enjoyed living and being a person for some time now. And since my surgery, I have really delighted in the slowing down and simplifying of everything. I revel in the smallest daily tasks and I just feel a lot of peace when it comes to my home and my daily life. Of course, I am processing a lot of painful things too and it can be really difficult but overall, I'm really grateful to be *here* and to have more days to simply be. I feel no pressure to do something amazing or the most important thing ever! Existing feels like more than enough-it feels magical! Magic in the mundane, always always. Even more so now.

I am a grown ass woman through and through

Wow, I could write a novel on this but for now I will say: It is both painful and disappointing AND incredibly liberating to see things, people and situations as they currently are. An ugly truth is still a truth and when the bubble of illusion (or delusion) is burst, it stings but then you can take action that is based in reality. There's something sobering and freeing in that, even if it hurts or isn't easy. It feels like a simultaneous ache in your chest and weight lifted from your back.

No part of me feels like a lost young woman with a need to prove myself, leave a mark on this world, get people to like me (or understand me) as I have felt in the past. I have seen over the last 10 months especially where I would allow things to slide, where I lacked healthy boundaries with certain people, where I looked the other way or made excuses (for myself and/or for other people). And now I just don't do that shit anymore. I wish I could un-experience some of the fucked up ways Chris and I were treated in our most terrifying and vulnerable times but we learned a lot and both set up strong, solid boundaries as a result of that. Easy? No. Important? Yep. Grown people shit? One hundred percent.

Now when something needs to be taken care of, I just take care of it. Almost anything can be figured out. Life is often inconvenient. Shitty things happen. Annoying things pop up. Our little plans get messed up. Things that used to really irritate me or throw me for a loop now feel like: meh. It's not brain surgery. I'll live. It can be figured out. And then I figure it out. Life does not owe me comfort, convenience and ease at every moment. I am capable, I can ask for help and when all else fails: I can Google that shit.

My brain is healing

It's still slow, but it's happening. I "look normal" but that was true back in the summer when my brain was still swollen and I could feel fluid sloshing around (yuckkkkk). I still get confused, fatigued and deal with cognitive things like memory issues and difficulty with emotional regulation at times but I can feel how far I've come in the last few months. I've figured out how to pace, how to pick what activities I can do each day to avoid crashing-that's given my brain capacity to heal. I don't push to the point of exhaustion because there's no reason to do that!

There are so many things I want to say and talk about and share and yap on and on about but this feels like a good start for the last 4+ months of life. I love y'all, thanks for hanging with me through this time of life. Sending you all so much love.

Love,

Alyssa (still a brain tumor free princess)

PS-Scroll to the bottom to get the guide on how to wake up at 5 am and be your best self!!

Kidding :) It would be more like: How to use spite as a spiritual practice to buoy yourself through something terrifying and traumatic and still come out the other side a fiery little bitch!!

Step 1: Think of the bitchiest reason you can't die yet (ex: to keep your partner from ending up with someone new, to seek revenge on your enemy, to prove to your ex you can do that thing they told you was impossible).

Step 2: Think of the three worst things you've done in the last 3 years. See? Not a good enough person to die young.

Hmmm this is getting somewhere...

Okay, I'm off to get ready for bed hehe.

Love love love to you.

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