Survivorship and sanity
It’s a funny thing this notion of recovery. We have so many assumptions about what that means and how quickly it can or should happen. But it’s different for everyone for a few reasons and it takes it’s own time no matter how quickly you’d like to expedite the healing.
There’s the process of our body trying to rebuild and reconstruct after throwing so much at it for years (not months—years) and then the expectation that we can physically do things we used to again. It’s the same old story of our head trying to run the show—“Hey, I’m in charge and this is the plan”.
Except it’s not the plan, and the head is not in charge anymore. The body had been barraged and beaten and deconstructed for too long and decides this isn’t how the program is going to work. So needless to say, the brakes go on, joints get cranky, and muscles don’t cooperate. Sometimes it communicates with the brain and they work together, but there are times when they simply don’t which has a dissolving effect and creates a vague space of unattached emotion. Feelings that rise up out of nowhere and have no place to land. Memories, experiences, moments that slip in and out and leave you feeling weird and vulnerable and displaced from where you used to be.
Photo by Rowan Chestnut on Unsplash
Your body has a memory of its own, it holds the trauma and pain that’s been pressed into its mitochondria and stores this in our system. It’s difficult to recognize and give full measure to that experience, we’re rarely as aware of what our body needs. But what changes through this experience is the shift to connect and accept our larger physicality as now being dominant and in charge. It becomes necessary to support whatever is required to keep it safe and healthy, comforted and strong as this is now the most important thing we can do right now.
I’m not done with chemo and it’s not done with me, so it’s difficult to say how I’ll feel when this is all over. I’d like to think I can jump on my bike again, start back to swimming, or just go trekking across an open field and not worry about the return trip. But most likely I’ll take each measure and action with care and consideration, and build on them until I’m back to what “we” can be again.
The “we” is me—me and my body. Two of us working hard to get back to what makes us equally happy, having struck a hard bargain with one another many months ago, to achieve what will become the outcome of a lifetime.
