Blog Entry #3 by Marilyn Herasymowych

Marilyn Herasymowych

My mother was my first teacher, and one of the things she taught me to do was how to learn.  This would prove to be the most painful lesson I would ever learn, and it would forever brand itself on my body, my mind, and my spirit.  Learning, specifically deep and profound learning that is transformational, has always been painful for me.  It is, and likely always will be, like walking barefoot on broken glass.  I do enjoy learning as long as it is relatively easy for me.  Ideas have always come effortlessly to me, especially ones that interest me.  Ideas just pop into my head, and I am happy when I am not obstructed and can do something with them.  It was easy for me to learn to swim, to play guitar, and to write.  But, there is a dark side that surfaces when the learning gets harder for me to do.  My resistance increases relative to how hard it will be to learn.  It’s like I’m a lazy learner.  I want it easy all of the time.  I think my mother knew this about me, which is why she pushed me so much.  I believe that I am fundamentally a learner, but not one who loves learning.  I think that learning is hard for me because I always had to learn on someone else’s terms.  Luckily, this has never stopped me from learning.

There is an activity that Emily, Henry, and I ask participants to do in the courses we teach that helps them to understand what it means to deeply learn something and to create new knowledge.  I have always been taken with this activity, perhaps because I so keenly feel what learning means for me.  In this activity, we ask people to sign their name with their preferred hand.  Then, we ask them to switch hands and sign with their non-preferred hand.  Learning can only happen when you don’t know what you’re doing or you can’t do it very well.  So, learning in this activity happens not when you sign your name with your preferred hand; it only happens when you sign your name with your non-preferred hand.  The issue arises when you ask people what it feels like to sign with their non-preferred hand.  Most people find it uncomfortable, embarrassing, or a sign of incompetence, all feelings that can be hard to take.  In between the comfort of signing your name with your preferred hand, and signing your name with your non-preferred hand, lies a Learning Zone, a place in which you make decisions about whether or not to take a leap of faith and learn despite how hard it is.  In our work, this leap is taken by people who we would call expert learners.  Expert learners do not give up when the going gets tough.

As the years went by, my mother dragged me across that Learning Zone.  With each failure to conform, she would drag me even harder, until I believed that I had no choice.  I’m not sure if I was born an expert learner, but I do know that I became one.  Even now, so many years later, I am driven to learn, feeling my mother’s hands on my collar pulling me across that Learning Zone.  I can’t help myself.  No matter how treacherous the journey feels for me and my soul, I can’t stop myself from crossing, from learning, and from creating new knowledge.  Each time I cross, I am torn apart, drowning in the pieces left behind, desperate to learn and reconstruct who I have now become.  This is the gift my mother gave me.  I must learn from every experience.  I must milk it for everything I can.  It seems the only way that I can make this journey worth the pain that learning inflicts on me.  Although seldom a feeling a joy, learning gives my life meaning, and for that I am grateful.

Like my mother, the first six months of my cancer experience dragged me across the Learning Zone.  And like I was with my mother in my early years, I tried my best to be a good girl.  I listened to what the doctors and nurses said, did what I was told to do, but even that wasn’t enough.  I couldn’t stay on the path they had laid out for me.  I was supposed to have an easy chemo experience.  After all, I was on one of the easiest forms of chemo, I was fit, and I had a form of cancer that shouldn’t kill me.  It would be hard, but it wouldn’t be really hard.  I wouldn’t even lose all of my hair.  But, with each chemo treatment, I fell further and further off the expected path.  Each time I failed to have an easy chemo experience, I saw the same disappointment in my doctors’ faces as I saw in my mother’s face.  As the side effects stripped capabilities and capacities that were so much a part of me, their disappointment grew.  There was no explanation for why I was so affected by such a light form of chemo.  Once again I had failed.  I was the exception to the rule, and the doctors simply didn’t know what to do with me.

I came out of the chemo experience in mid-July 2009 unable to walk, unable to read or think clearly, unable to eat properly, unable to do just about anything.  I had severe pain in my hips, legs, feet, and hands.  My neuropathy (numbness) was so severe I couldn’t feel anything from my waist down and from my elbows down.  I had severe nausea, constantly bordering on the reflex to vomit.  My life as I knew it was now gone.  I had entered my own version of No Man’s Land, and all I could see was the pieces of my life hanging from barbed wire, shell shocked, and paralyzed with fear.

It’s been two years since this cancer experience started.  Two years during which I have struggled to rebuild my life, and again I have failed.  I failed to realize that, during chemo, I was still operating the same way I did when I was a child, trying so hard to win my mother’s love.  But now, I have had this rare chance to view my life though a different lens.  I wish I could have learned this in an easier way, but that is not how it works for me.  Perhaps my mother’s success in teaching me to learn has made it impossible for me to back away.  I needed this chemo experience to help me to learn that my mother did love me, and that I need to now free my true self.  As usual, this is not easily learned, but then, when has it ever been easy for me to learn?

Note: If you’d like to know more about Marilyn’s cancer journey, check out her blog at www.cancerbrokeallmypencils.com.