My grandmother asked me a little while ago if I ever asked myself “Why me?” and I answered without hesitation: "No, I don’t." From the very beginning when I heard the diagnosis, one thought came in to sharp focus: this experience with cancer was here to teach me something. Many things, actually. I felt it at a deep, soul-level.
And from that moment early on, I also knew that one of those lessons was going to be how to change entirely my relationship to my body. I also felt from that same moment, that this might be the hardest of all the lessons. I certainly never anticipated talking about this one publicly. There’s too much shame wrapped up in that one. If I’ve learned anything from Brené Brown, it’s that shame can’t survive being spoken. Shame can’t survive empathy.
Like so many women I know, this relationship with my body and self-image has been, at very best, complicated for my entire life. With a few exceptions (periods of time that were marked by really unhealthy behaviors) I have never been happy with the size, shape, appearance of my body. Even as I type that now, I’m sad at the truth of that statement. What a waste it is.
This body threw itself around a volleyball court as a teenager, has run multiple half-marathons, and yes, even though it was the last one up and down, has climbed a volcano in Guatemala (it’s a good story). It has expressed tenderness, anger, and power. It has traveled the world, and felt the pain of heartbreak and the euphoria of love. Perhaps its greatest accomplishment yet is having grown, birthed, and breastfed two children who take my breath away.
In fact, the girls’ arrivals opened the door to my acting (if not yet thinking) more compassionately toward my own body. I know that if I want them to grow up with a different relationship with their body, they will watch what I do, not what I say. So, at least around them, I stopped acting self-conscious about how flattering my outfit was or, God forbid, getting in to a swimsuit. The outside world’s expectations will reach them sooner than I want, but at least in our home, they will not learn to put themselves down. And I hope they will learn to love what their bodies are capable of, without getting so caught up with an unrealistic ideal of what their bodies should look like. Up until now, I have felt like a bit of faker. I have been showing them what that looks like without really believing it myself.
So now, here I am with cancer.
In the very beginning, my ultimate shame was that I thought I had somehow done something to cause my cancer. I wasn’t sure exactly how - maybe it was the extra pounds I carried since my pregnancies that I could never quite shake, maybe it was the wine, maybe it was the Diet Coke. I carried that around for weeks until late one night, Sean picked up on something I said and he stopped me. “You do realize that you didn’t cause this, right? This is the result of some bad cells and you did not cause this.” The dam broke and I cried the biggest, ugliest cry I’ve ever cried. I felt such a massive release in that moment.
This is not to say that there aren’t healthy lifestyle choices to be made that can give you a better chance at a longer life. Or for that matter, that I could make choices in my life that will give me a better chance at a longer life. Of course there are. But that’s a long way from holding myself responsible for causing this cancer. And I realized that there was a twisted logic to it: if I was responsible for causing the cancer, then there actually was a party responsible, someone/something I could direct my anger and hate toward. And honestly, if I was looking for someone responsible, who better than me, who has had a fraught relationship with this body for 40 years already?
And even more than that, if I could hold myself responsible for causing the cancer, then I could also be responsible for preventing it from coming back. Of course, neither of these things are true. The process to understanding this started the process of Letting Go.
I know now that I cannot hate my way to self-acceptance any more than I can hate my way to healthy.
There is a very strange aspect to this type of cancer, which is that I have no physical symptoms at all. There were no pounding headaches or searing pain to alert me to its existence. Nor do I feel the need to be relieved of these kinds of horrific symptoms. All of the physical “evidence” of this disease comes from the treatment - the thing meant to cure me.
I am grateful to have it, but there are so many side effects to my cure. There are, of course, the obvious ones: nausea and fatigue. There’s also the occasional red face from the steroids, neuropathy, and the possibility of losing my finger and toenails (yeah, yikes). But there are also longer term changes to this body in store for me as well: a massive surgery, burns from radiation, early menopause, and more side effects from hormone therapy I’ll be on for ten years.
Even though I love a healthy dose of f-bombs, the “fuck cancer” movement/concept doesn’t really resonate for me anymore. I totally get the anger toward cancer and the devastation that it leaves in its wake. I’ve even had the thought when loved ones have been diagnosed with cancer before. "Fuck that!” I’ve thought. I’m angry that they have to go through all of that. But now that I’m here myself, it doesn’t fit quite right. Of course, I want the cancer gone. But there’s much more to it than that for me now. It doesn’t seem like enough.
In the Healing Light meditation I do, I am asked to visualize a part of my body that needs healing, the part that needs some love. At first, that part was really hard for me - I thought I was being asked to give love to the cancer inside my body. Now I visualize it as giving love to that part of my body. And I visualize healing light surrounding the cancer and completely destroying it. It lights up each and every cell, and then lights up every other cell around it until I’m filled with light.
It starts with love.
So, while I’m far from having conquered this particular volcano in my life, I commit to this for myself: I will do all I can to love myself to healthy.
Mind, soul, and yes, body.