Venus

Awhile back, I had the awesome experience of being shot by my friend Clayton Cubitt. This is what you look like after breast cancer treatment. Thanks so much to the incomparable Katie Wedlund for styling me.

Medium

I wrote a piece on Medium about when my brain got squishy.

You realize there is a problem when you cannot sort the laundry.

Picture it:

There you are, in the laundry room.

The laundry basket is full of dirty laundry.

You look out the window.

It’s:

1. overcast
2. the sky is a pale blue with cloud streaking across it
3. it’s raining and you’re wondering if the roof is going to start leaking again

[READ]

Experiments

Chemo Port (No Longer There), Chicago, Illinois
I did some experiments lately.

I took a camera class. That led me to realize I don't really care to figure out how my camera works. I should work with it as is or buy a camera from another decade.

I took an improv class. I pretended to flirt with someone at a pretend post office. Afterwards, it occurred to me that I already knew I was willing to do anything in front of a group, no matter how stupid it made me look.

I went to pilates. I'm sick of yoga. Pilates made me feel like my muscles were glued to my skeleton again, rather than engaged in an ongoing internal civil war.

Conclusion: Experimentation is good.

Minific

  Red Door, Chicago, Illinois
I submitted a piece of tiny fiction to Nanoism. It was rejected. Here it is:

The tumor was terrible. Pulled at its leash, would not heel. Its malignance was the least of it, she decided, dragging it down the street. 

Quote of the day

I'm not haunted by what happened to me. I never had any desire for vengeance. I never felt any need, even, for justice. Now I feel if I say something about it, people try and use it in certain ways and make it something that it's not. It is what it is to me. It happened. And actually, I got breast cancer a year after, and I think that scarred me worse than what happened in Egypt. When Egypt was over, it was over. I got on a plane, I came home, and I was thousands of miles away, and I had a choice. My choice was very rational. Are you going to take the life that you've been given, or are you not going to live it? Are you going to live it fully, freely — or are you not? Are you gonna be a victim — or are you not? -- Lara Logan

An excerpt from my novel-in-progress

The wife looks out the window. In the distance, she can see the tumor.

It is half-hidden behind a shrub at the park that abuts the alley behind the house. It is fiddling with a leaf and oozing a small pool of blood. The tumor sees her seeing it and withdraws, pressing itself into the leaves, concealing and congealing.

The wife looks at the dough ball. She pushes an errant raisin back into it.

It’s possible the tumor wasn’t a tumor at all. It’s fall. The leaves are turning vermillion, goldenrod, pumpkin. Perhaps she mistook a seasonal change for sickness.

Story of my writing life

This is the outline of the presentation I'm doing at the Crossroads Writers Conference this weekend as part of the Freelancers Summit on Friday.

THE FREELANCE LIFE

-- Born and raised in Berkeley, CA
-- HS drop out, UCB grad, UIC writers program
-- Gypsy scholar, Father dies
-- Book publicist, The Internet, The Postfeminist Playground
-- Porn, politically incorrect, punditry
-- Move to LA, start freelancing, TV
-- Beat: culture, sex, adult movie industry
-- 2002: Leg injury, launch RCB, traffic junkie
-- 2003 – 2005: New Orleans, mental breakdown, suicidal
-- 2005: Hurricane Katrina, move to VA, waitress
-- 2008: Time Warner editor, the art of online outreach
-- 2009: They Shoot Porn Stars, Don’t They?
-- 2011: Downsized, Forbes blogger, digital copywriting
-- 2011.5: Marriage, cancer, work as identity
-- 2012: Stop everything but Forbes, reinvention, novel
-- Tips: Pick a beat that isn’t boring, get rejected a lot, learn to hustle

Don't be a boob

Read my latest post on Forbes: "What Doesn't Kill You Makes You More Creative."

The day after my last chemo treatment, I went to a porn convention and wrote about it. What was I thinking? I had to double-check the dates just now. I must have been out of my mind. I was very tired. And bald. But I had something to prove to myself. I was angry I had cancer. If I’d run into cancer at a bar, I would’ve beaten the crap out of it.

[READ]

Shrinkage

Every Wednesday morning, or whenever, I go to the person I call the "cancer shrink." Basically, he's a social worker connected to the hospital. We sit in this really spare room and talk. It's just off the hall where you get your chemo. So you complain while people zonked out on Benadryl get toxic waste pumped into their veins.

I like the social worker because he is very hard to read. In fact, he rarely expresses much. I like this because I don't complain a lot outside of the cancer shrink room, or at least I think I don't, and this means that when I complain in the cancer shrink room, the person I'm in there with isn't making some big deal out of it and weird faces and what have you.

I was wearing the T-shirt you see above today. I sat down and waited in the waiting room before the appointment. There was another woman in there, older than me and wearing a red hat. I'm bald and mostly don't cover it up. I think this is because I originally thought I was trying to prove something to everyone else -- Fuck that shit -- but I think really I'm trying to prove something to myself.

Fuck hiding. Or whatever.

The lady said she wanted to not wear a hat, and she sort of tilted up her hat so I could see the mostly gone hair there, nothing but a few strands left or so. We got diagnosed around the same time, and we have the same number of treatments left. And she said I looked beautiful. Twice, I think. And then when the cancer shrink showed up, she told him that I looked beautiful, too. So, thanks, lady in hat, for that.

She said something when we were talking about mostly it's hard because of vanity. Yeah, I said, because you can't hide it anymore, not even to yourself, when you look in the mirror. She nodded. She knew what I was saying.

Thanks!

A new study does not show Why Cancer Is Good for You, but I do:

Writing it, I get to do something other than internalize, or worry about, or have anxiety over all the weird things that happen along the way. Like the crazy things people say to you. Or the time you almost knock over the stand that the chemo bag hangs from when you’re in the bathroom because you’re trying to flush the toilet with your foot but you’re too high on Xanax and Benadryl to stay upright.

[READ, IMAGE]

Surgery

I had surgery. Here's what happened.

Several hours later, they roll me downstairs again. In a small room, they mash my breast into a mammography machine and stick needles in my breast that will help show the surgeon the location of the tumor. I see myself reflected in the partition behind which everyone else hides while they take images of my breast. My head is turned at a hard angle, pressed against the side of the machine. Something is running out of my punctured breast. Blood? Blue dye? I am unsure. They roll me upstairs again.

[READ]

Cancerpants

I wrote a post for Forbes on how men deal with cancer. I included email exchanges with Howard Rheingold, who had, as he puts it, "cancer of the asshole," Damon Brown, who had testicular cancer, and Marty Wehrenberg, who had stomach cancer.

Thank you to all three men for helping me out, for giving me permission to share their emails, and for being awesome.

So….I know this is not the easiest medicine to take right now, but what I’m telling you boils down to: the fear will diminish with time. Eventually, it becomes a kind of blessing. You notice that everyone runs around pretending they aren’t going to die. Your relationships with your loved ones becomes more intense and poignant. A lot of poetry makes sense at a visceral level. It’s really easy to not sweat the small stuff. On the other side of cancer is an appreciation of life. I have moments every day when the simple act of breathing and the feeling of sun on me is a kind of ecstasy. I see life through a cleaner lens. Nobody would volunteer for this, but surviving the diagnosis and treatment and fear has certain psychological and philosophical benefits.

[READ, IMAGE]

Outtake

Outtake by Clayton Cubitt

The Things They Carried in Their Bras

"Throat cancer," he said, tracing the scar that ran from his ear to his windpipe.

It was sort of breathtaking, sitting in an office with a view of the lake in winter, talking to a man in a suit who was making a motion like he was slitting his own throat.

[READ, IMAGE]

I get email

Hi Susannah,

Forgive me if this comes off as crass, but you make breast cancer sexy, what a wonderful picture. Best wishes for your recovery.

Warm regards,
[Redacted]

Biopsy

Biopsy, Chicago, Illinois

Age

How old am I?

Let's find the fuck out today on Forbes!

If you live your life in a box, maybe you end up looking perfect on the outside. If you live your life outside the box, you end up with a face like a map, the tributaries revealing all the things you’ve done, and you wear your battle scars for all to see.

[READ, IMAGE]

TV

If you want to be like me, you should probably read this.

If you can’t condense your message into a 10-word soundbite, you don’t belong on TV. If you don’t get that part of doing well on TV means cultivating a look, you don’t belong on TV. If you think being on TV is where everyone will understand you, you don’t belong on TV.

TV is like gladiators fighting in a stadium. You have to be fast, you have to be telegenic, and you have to be able to dumb it down without sounding like an idiot. TV doesn’t play your game; it plays its own game.

[READ, IMAGE]

I get email

Susannah:

What if your next few Forbes postings had nothing at all to do with your current breast cancer battle?

What if your next article was entitled "What Strippers Can Teach Trophy Wives and Junior League Members"? (Juvederm and wrinkle fillers injected into the foot pads so the Louboutins don't hurt).

The next article could be "How Tampa, Fl Strippers are Gearing up for the GOP Convention". Somebody is going to write that article - why not you? Republicans; naked women; money...

Your readers are set up for the medical drama/heroic female victim/struggle in an unfair world storyline. But this isn't the Lifetime Television Network.

What if you gave them Susannah Breslin instead and made them wait?

[Redacted]

MRI

MRI, Chicago, Illinois