When I was middle school science teacher, I would often ask my students to kiss their brain. I got this idea from visiting my friend's kindergarten classroom. She would ask her students to kiss their brain, and they would take their fingers, tap them to their mouth and then to the top of their head. And it truly was as cute as you can picture it to be. So I decided to bring it back to my middle school classroom, which could have gone one of two ways, but it ended up being a really fun ritual for us, too. And I would ask them to kiss their brain for all the work they did in class as a practice of gratitude.
After teaching middle school, I came back to grad school to get my PhD in psychology. My research is within the area of positive psychology, which is the science that investigates the strengths and factors that allow individuals and communities to thrive. I also get to teach psychology to undergrad students and high school students. I love teaching psych, and my absolute favorite unit to teach In Intro Psych is the brain. But while I love teaching about the brain, I thought it would be pushing it to ask my undergrads, aka adults, to kiss their brains. So three years would go by before I would remember that fun phrase.
One day after teaching last year, I had a terrible migraine that left half of my face numb and blurred my vision. The migraines kept happening. I saw multiple doctors, and then I started experiencing dizzy spells. The neurologist ordered an MRI, and I remember being so excited because then I would be able to use my own brain pictures when I taught brain imaging to my students. But as it turns out, my MRI wasn't too picture perfect. The doctor called me and asked me to go to the ER because there was a large mass in the right hemisphere of my brain, and that's where I saw the image for the first time.
I have never been more scared in my life than I was that night, and with tears dripping down my face, in the hospital, I kissed my brain for the first time since I had left my middle school classroom. I made it my mantra, and I kissed my brain every single day, leading up to and after surgery. Then, two weeks later, after surgery, the pathology reports came back and I was diagnosed with an anaplastic astrocytoma.
The weeks following were very difficult. I tried to figure out what I was struggling with the most by looking back on all the things I had been writing about this experience. I wrote and posted this on Instagram about a week after I received that pathology report: "I will keep fighting. I will keep loving, I will keep living, I will keep loving. I will keep living." And then about a week after that, I wrote this: "Fighter. I tried it on to see how it felt because I kept hearing those words next to my name, like a job, like an identity, like a role. Fighter. I look at myself in the mirror. It felt OK at first, but soon it became exhausting, too heavy to lift, too much to carry, too burdensome to bear. I took it off and left it on the floor. War was not for me. A body is not a battlefield."
I realized that I had been introduced to the fight narrative. When people heard my diagnosis, I became a fighter. "You're a fighter," "Keep fighting," "Beat this tumor," were the top comments. And then there was the internet, the place I so desperately searched for people who were doing well with their diagnosis. But the top hashtags to search for were #braintumorssuck, #cancersucks and #cancerfighter. I understand completely why those hashtags exist, but I was so eager to find the hashtag #hiIhaveabraintumorthatmightnevergoaway andImstilllivingandthriving and I guess there just isn't a ring to that one. I hated the idea that I was going to be at war with my brain because I had spent months and years kissing it instead. I hated the suggestion of naming my tumor something awful because the reality is that it was going to be my neighbor for the rest of my life, and I hated the guided imagery training that asked me to picture chemo as an army coming to battle the cancer cells because I didn't want to spend over a year of my life at war with my own body.
I can see how these elements of the fight narrative can be empowering for people, but for me, I knew it wasn't going to work. So I started to reference well-being practices that I had learned from my own studies. Doctors always laugh with me when they find out that I'm a bio-psych and neuroscience major and psych PhD student. Then when they ask what I'm studying and I tell them I study resilience and well-being, they either laugh again, say something like, "Oh, that's irrelevant," or go, "Aw." The irony was never lost on me. I have read so many stories and studies of resilience, but I never pictured the day that I would have to personally experience it.
I read and taught about gratitude practices, specifically as a well-being strategy, and even though I knew the positive effects, I had never seriously practiced them myself. I started to incorporate some of these exercises into my life. I tried to stop focusing on what my body had done "wrong" and focus on the gratitude I had for my body instead. And really, I realized this is something I had been doing when I was kissing my brain those days leading up to and after surgery. Gratitude became the tool that helped me restructure my vision of illness and disability when the world was telling me I should fight it instead. Instead of thinking about if I would be able to have kids one day, I thought of how amazing it was that my brain, despite its trauma, was able to deliver the perfect amount of hormones to my body to produce enough eggs to save for a later date. Every time I went to radiation and was put in my mask, I kissed my brain and I focused on the resident telling me how the healthy cells would be able to repair over time and the cancer cells could not. And when the operative notes came back for my surgery, a day that I remember very well and had been scared to think about, I read the note out loud, sobbing, happy and grateful tears, thinking about what my neurosurgeon's team did. I started to feel such an immense sense of gratitude for science, medicine and my medical team, that those thoughts started to drown out the "What is my life going to be like?" thoughts.
The more I practiced gratitude, the more peace I felt in my situation, and this got me interested in what could be happening with the science of gratitude at a neurological level. There are several positive psychological and social outcomes of gratitude, like increases in happiness, decreases in depression, having stronger relationships and experiencing positive emotion. And fMRI studies show us that several parts of our brain and pathways are activated when we experience and express gratitude. One of these parts is the medial prefrontal cortex, an area associated with the management of negative emotions. Together, these changes in neurotransmitters and hormones combined with activated neural pathways, help us cognitively restructure potentially harmful thoughts to better manage our circumstances. And the cool thing is that we can intentionally activate these gratitude circuits in our brain. In general, the more we do something, the easier it becomes, and our brains work the same way. The more we activate these gratitude circuits, the less effort it takes to stimulate those pathways the next time, and the stronger those pathways become. Neuroplasticity is a term I teach my students that refers to our brain's ability to form new neural connections throughout life. Which means this is something that anyone can practice and get better at over time.
So I kept practicing gratitude even when it seemed impossible. I continue to thank my brain for the amazing work it does as I prepare for 12 more rounds of chemo this year. I write down three things I'm grateful for and why I'm grateful for them, no matter what, every morning that I wake up. I write "thank you" notes to my heroes and health care, nurses who get the IV in the first time. The anesthesiology resident, who held my hand during the awake portions of my surgery, radiation therapist that play my playlist during treatment and administrative staff that makes me smile every time I walk into the hospital.
I do want to take a second here and practice what I teach to shout out my doctors and their teams from the Michigan Medicine Multidisciplinary Brain Tumor Clinic. I have never met such intelligent, kind and patient people. Thank you for making me feel brave when I sometimes felt the opposite.
I think the universe might think it's funny that a psych instructor and researcher who studies well-being ended up with a brain tumor. The truth is that we need more awareness and more research regarding brain tumors and brain cancer. Doctors can't exactly predict how my tumor will behave, and really, none of us can predict what our lives are going to be like exactly. But what I hope I can show you is that we can also be grateful for the unexpected challenges.
I don't want to dismiss people who may find the fight narrative empowering. I also don't want to suggest that it's by any means easy to find ways to be grateful in dealing with adversity. This has been the hardest thing that I've ever had to do. But I do want to empower those that feel like me, that there's another way to go through whatever your journey may be, that loving your body doesn't have to be conditional. And that by practicing gratitude we can actually wire our brains to help us build resilience.
And lastly, I hope everyone, no matter where you are or what you are doing, can take a second to kiss your own brain and thank it for all that it does for you.
