When She Left
Searching for who I am after cancer has been a difficult journey for me. I know I’m here; I can see me, I recognize my reflection in the mirror, I hear myself speaking…but how can I mentally and emotionally fit into this skin bag the same way I used to? Everything on the inside feels different. The voice of my thoughts, the depths of my thoughts and ability to process things, my inner most defined sense of space has been altered and I am struggling to return to a space that feels like the right fit for me.
Before being re-diagnosed, I worked as a therapist and I recognize how this journey has triggered a trauma response and how I feel the continuous need to try and keep things together, but honestly…she feels lost inside herself. She searches for the parts of herself she thought would be waiting for her when she got back but now she knows she can’t go back — she has to move forward in search for what she needs now. She has to redefine what she needs, where she needs to be and how she will move through the next chapters. I turned 50 this year — and I’m certain that at this point in my life some redefining would’ve naturally occurred, even without cancer, but now I recognize changes that perhaps needed to happen and couldn’t until I tenderly arrived in these places because of cancer.
I begin to dig and search for the things I believe I am in need of. The things I know I can control. The things I dreamt of during the year of fucked up treatments, endless side effects and surgery…I lived inside those dreams because that was the only place I could be sure cancer couldn’t penetrate and also the only place I would remain in control. Control felt like it was handed over when I was told I had cancer. I believed I could escape into my mind, even for a moment and create or visualize the spaces that I really wanted to exist after all this was over — and when I could choose me.
I began to create a voice that recognized how to speak up for herself. A voice that allowed her to feel safe when she felt incredibly insecure and unbalanced. I spent time with myself and my thoughts (lots of time), and allowed myself to be heard by the only person that mattered in those moments — me!! I acknowledged her pain and suffering in a way I had never been able to before. I saw her as someone who had suffered the loss of her own companionship and for the appreciation for what she could still offer to herself. I believed that if I just stuffed it all down and kept it quiet no one would notice. She noticed. She felt like she had deserted herself and was there alone and struggling to know what to do next.
Learning how to actually listen to myself, to hear what I needed from me, understand what I wanted and to really sit with what I was feeling — that’s the work I was being presented with. But I did it. Each and every damn day, I sat with this stuff. I mean REALLY sat IN this stuff. A friend once referred to this as “sitting in my puddle”, saying that sometimes we just need to sit in our puddle alone and maybe splash or soak, sometimes we want someone to sit with us, maybe splashing too…or perhaps not. I love this image in my head. I connect with the visual and how that metaphor just takes up beautiful space inside my being. I love it!
We all have such long and difficult roads to travel at different times and sometimes we just need a new map or maybe a new direction. No matter the distance or destination, we will always travel with ourselves and sometimes that person is not who you want to be around (sometimes she can F off), I know for myself, being alone with me during this cancer journey was terrible at times. One day, while I was allowing my tears to hydrate my face really well, I connected with an image in my mind about a part of me leaving — literally just stepping out from myself and leaving this more broken and fractured part of my being alone to deal with the cancer. I actually “felt” this energetic part of me leave my physical self — “She” went up and to the right hand side of my physical body. And with that, a very emotionally inept part of my being was left in charge, while I was navigating cancer. When I realized this, I both panicked and leaned into it. What does this mean? It definitely felt lonely and scary but it also felt like something I needed to understand more deeply.
I knew, for some reason, that this journey was meant for “her” — the broken, silenced and scared part of my being who never had a voice. The part of myself that had hidden beneath any and every surface she could find so that no one would see her. Now I need to give her permission to come to the surface and breathe. Now, after all this time here is Her voice.