“I’d really just like to feel like me.”
That was my go-to answer. Just wanting to feel like me.
When my cancer was first diagnosed, I felt like my body betrayed me. The only thing I knew had started working against me and now I was left with a fierce mistrust that followed throughout my treatments, surgeries, recoveries, and everything after. The churning thoughts and need for reassurances—that sometimes things like this just happen—were not easily quelled and often replaced by another worry. And I just wanted to get back to feeling like me, to have my body be my own.
Admittedly, my baseline for anxieties had always been very high. I was a person who could most certainly find something to be nervous about, whether it was rooted in reality or had only a glimpse of rationale and likelihood. I needed to have multiple solutions to the multitude of possibilities of what life could bring upon opening my eyes in the morning. And now this. Now, all of the protective modes that I’d managed had proven to be limited because something managed to exist in spite of my diligence of wanting everything to be safe and right.
For how much there is in this world outside of our scope of control, I had done my best, but the self-proclaimed authority had to be turned into trust. I had to be fully open with everyone, and not just open, but detailed and thoroughly transparent. Everyone had to know the exact same things about me. I had to rely on other people and believe that their heart was invested in my best interest. There was now something in front of me that I couldn’t take care of on my own, and I needed people. I needed people to take care of me if I wanted to feel like me again, which was what I wanted—just to feel like me.
And I did everything without question. Literally. I was never going to say that I wasn’t doing something relative to getting better, and occasionally, I didn’t even ask why something was to be. I did whatever was asked of me, and then some. It was full-steam ahead with Day One getting more and more distant in the rearview mirror. So I trusted. I accepted that people liked me and wanted the best for me, that I wasn’t simply to be tolerated, and that letting go in order to start over isn’t the worst thing to happen at all.
The comeback was far stronger than the setback, and I can say that the realization didn’t come as a miraculous turnabout the day that I got a clean bill of health. It took years. Years. Old habits die hard, so turning back to my old friend, “But what if…?” was near certain as it’s the only me I’ve known—until it wasn’t. It was a day like any other day where I plainly decided that I’m not missing out on things anymore. I’m not waiting any longer. I committed to doing as much as possible, whether I have people to join me or not. I didn’t second-guess but proceeded with the expectation that what lies ahead will be an adventure, big or small, notable or merely new.
But as a person can’t unsee things, they can’t unlearn them either. Cancer introduced “Just Me” to “Just Me Version 2.0.” The me I was trying so assuredly to feel like again was no longer what I wished for in the same way. It gave me the opportunity—and dare I say permission—to take the best and pack up the rest: a starting over that perhaps would have never arisen if not for cancer so flippantly interjecting itself in my space that I had once preferred to take up so little.
Not long ago, I was talking to one of my closest friends and I said that sometimes in spite of all my accumulated years and experiences, it still feels like I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing, and without any hesitation, she looked up at me and replied, “You’re having fun.”
Join the Conversation!
Leave a comment below. Remember to keep it positive!