The Lingering Poison in the Dragon's Voice

Often after a season of severe illness or trauma, we are left healing from wounds we cannot see, wounds that can be poison to our soul."Do not let kindness and truth leave you. Bind them around your neck. Write them on the tablet of your heart." Proverbs 3:3

Please welcome my friend, Amy Pribadi, to our series on kindness with her story of cancer, lingering poison, and a dragon slayer.

******

I would like to tell you a favorite story from my childhood, a story by Robin McKinley, entitled, The Hero and the Crown. It is a story of Lady Aerin, Firehair, Dragon-killer.

One day Aerin discovered a recipe for a balm that protected the skin from fire. She used it to hunt dragons. These were small dragons, the kind that stole sheep. Rumors grew of an ancient dragon, this one huge and evil, whose wings blotted out the sun. Aerin decided to slay this dragon. She smeared her ointment over her skin, her armor, and her horse, and equipped herself with her spears.

Aerin slew the dragon, but its fire was much more intense than anything she had anticipated. With one blast, the dragon fire singed off her hair, ate through her armor and even burned the air in the lungs. After the dragon was dead, she was too weak to celebrate. For several days she simply laid on the ground. Eventually she mounted her horse to ride back and tell the news – she had slain the dragon.

For months Aerin rested, and her physical wounds healed. Her hair began to grow back. Before, it was curly and the pale orange of leaping flames, but was now straight and dark like smoldering embers.

Other people went to the corpse of the dragon she had slain and cut off its head. They hung its head in the hall of the palace, a trophy.

Although the dragon was dead, Aerin still heard its voice, sometimes whispering, sometimes screaming. The voice told her that she was a freak, that her people didn’t trust her. She grew sicker as the dragon’s voice poisoned her, sicker than the dragon fire ever made her. Aerin sought the help of a not-quite-mortal man, who told her that it was the dragon’s head that was slowly killing her.

When Aerin returned to the palace, she and her soon-to-be husband rolled the head out of the palace to be lost forever in the wastes of the desert.

Amy continues: I had cancer. I went through the usual treatments. The dragon was slain; I was in remission. My hair grew back and I regained some of my previous strength. Even though I was in remission, I was still sick. I had gone from attending university, working, and exercising most of the days of the week to not being able to go grocery shopping without feeling exhausted for the rest of the week.

But what made me the sickest was the anger that I held onto, and it blinded me to others who tried to help. Its voice told me to indulge in self-pity and anger. When I picked up my copy of this book and re-read it, I thought about how similar Aerin’s story was to mine. I had slain the dragon, but I was still staring at the dragon’s head as it whispered to me, stirring up a greater poison within than the chemicals that had burned my veins. I had let go of kindness, and bitterness was preventing me from both accepting kindness from others and giving kindness. The anger I had felt may have been justified by my situation, but I had to learn to let go in order to truly recover.

Never let go of kindness. Let go of bitterness first.

******

People attach different meaning to the dragon, but I have always used that symbol in reference to cancer, as in, I am fighting the dragon. Therefore, I love the imagery in Amy's story. I have known the poison of holding onto pain and bitterness after finishing treatment. When Amy opened an Etsy shop of unique individually-folded origami earrings, I purchased a set of dragon earrings. Some might find that a little crazy, but it works for me.

The earrings remind me that there is beauty to be found in the difficult. In the hard.

And the earrings remind me that cancer cannot take the parts of me that are truly valuable.

Cancer does not have that power. Amy has other unique jewelry available, including cranes and butterflies at Paper Light Jewelry.