Mandyland

An introduction to meditation with some pretty basic instructions with a bit of commentary.

In this monologue, Sarah recounts her feelings over the past 3 years of dealing with cancer both how it looked from the outside and how it felt from the inside. At the beginning, she wondered "how am I going to come out the other side?” It felt like she was walking through a doorway in Alice in Wonderland and then suddenly stumbled upon the strange universe. She realized that the way that you look at the world shifts. And a big theme for her, is that cancer is slow. 

Today... I felt my existential depression... and am so glad I happened upon that term recently.

For reference, I was reading from the book A Parent's Guide to Gifted Children, by James Webb, Janet Gore, Edward Amend, and Arlene DeVries.

Ok so Mike learned a whole bunch about the blockchain a while ago when we bought some bitcoin and ethereum and all that fun cryptocurrency stuff. I didn’t. But then I started listening to the Zig Zag podcast and wanted to learn more about it. So… on our next date we find ourselves going down the rabbit hole of trying to figure it out. It got fun for me when we realized that I was part of the internet era before the world wide web and he was not. Mike’s 5.5 years younger than I am, which equates to 6 grade school years. So that’s a pretty big difference during the internet era. Anyway… it turns out our understanding of the internet and the world wide web was different. So we figure that one out and continue on talking about blockchain and ethereum, which we both think are important to watch and understand because they might end up being the next new “internet”.  This conversation is really funny to me… partially because I think in 5 years we’ll look back and laugh at this. Kind of like having a conversation about a phone WAY back when it started and asking questions like “so where do the voice live?” “Who delivers the voice?”. Even listening back 2 months later while writing these notes, I see that I know so much more now! Anyway… here is a conversation we should probably be embarrassed to share. Please don’t quote us on the details… like what gopher is! 

Sarah and I have been talking for a long time about her cancer but this conversation was planned as a way of starting her series of episodes for Mandyland. We had a bunch of ideas planned but realized early that it was hard to figure out where to start. So we started with why she has been hesitant to share this, despite her desire to. That got us talking about her career and the impact cancer has had on her career. From there we talk about where she is now and a brief introduction to her cancer. We end with how valuable it is to talk about stuff.

At the end of Season One, I put out a call to listeners to send in voice-memo reactions to anything from Season One. Sarah replied and is now a regular guest on Mandyland for Season two! This is her reply.

I love Paul’s curiosity about mental health, psychology, and neuroscience. We sat down at the Centre for Social Innovation, which is where we met, on the upstairs patio of the Regent Park location. He is prepping for his new book to be released, which will be a very interactive journey populating the content around the book in curious ways, through public story telling events and conversations with others (like me) about mental other. It was a privilege for me to have this conversation with him about depression. We veer into a few different directions because, like I said, he is so curious, and just being around him and his curiosity gets me all fired up to talk about this. There are some basic conversations out there about mental health and then there are conversations that are more holistic and nuanced. This, I think, is more of a nuanced conversation about anxiety and depression. 

August 2018 might just be the last of me breastfeeding!

This is a big one for me. I’ve been breastfeeding for 3 years and 2 months and I think…. I think… we’re done. Breastfeeding has been amazing and so hard in many ways, as it typically the case for many women. Sometimes it’s the act of doing it that’s hard… sometimes it’s the emotions around it. For me, it came naturally from a very physical sense but it’s been an emotional rollercoaster from then on. I’ve felt trapped and like my body is being used and on the otherhand I have loved it and been blown away by the awe of it all. Like I said, an emotional roller coaster. But… I think that’s all done now… wow.

So we’re starting off with a doozy… me and Mike talk about his recent diagnosis of Renal Cell Carcinoma. Yup, that’s what’s been happening over the summer. It started with a few scans for an unrelated reason and a tumour in his left kidney was detected incidentally. Surgery is planned and there is a good prognosis for it being curable. Here we discuss our feelings about it… sort of.

Welcome back! Just a short little introduction to what you can look forward to this season and why!