When I was a little kid, I trusted my body pretty well. I could count on it to run the fastest, land that ollie I was trying to do on my skateboard, send the soccer ball into the net for a goal, land feet-first into the water after flipping around in the air off the high-dive.
But as I got older, I started to trust my body less and less. In fact, I feared what it was doing to me, as it began contorting into all these different shapes and curves that I didn’t ask for or want as I was thrust into the horrors of adolescence. No matter what I did, I couldn’t stop it; and I realized more and more that I couldn’t trust my body to stay a place that felt like home for me. But after finally coming across the term “transgender,” learning there was something I could do to remedy some of this and advocating for myself to get the care I needed in order to do so, I was finally able to start taking back some control of the situation. I was finally going to have a chance to hopefully rebuild some of that trust that had been lost between myself and my physicality.
And then, cancer came along. Out-of-control white blood cells began building up into new unwanted shapes; these ones eventually burgeoning and bulging from my neck and torso and sending shooting rivers of pain throughout my body. For months, the doctors kept trying to tell me I probably “just” had some sort of infectious disease—until the biopsy results of a lymph node cut from the right side of my neck finally told them that it was actually lymphoma.
At this point, it had been many years since I had truly trusted my body, but still, I had to give it another chance: I had to trust that my body would respond to all the drugs they were pumping into me to try to save me.
Thankfully, it did. And especially as I recovered, and then was able to start taking testosterone to try and make my body feel more comfortable to me, I began to trust this physical vessel of mine a little more month by month, year by year. After an adolescence spent feeling so wrong about myself and trying to shut out and shut off everything my body was doing (and then rounding out said adolescence with a big grand finale of Having Cancer), it took some time to re-learn to trust my body. But slowly, I was making progress.
As I healed, I began to remember the feeling of vaulting powerfully and in-control through the air: the last contact of my hands on the ground before I hurled myself into a round-off handspring, then touching down again with my feet onto the soft grass. The feeling of my arms pulling me through the water, strength returning to my muscles with each stroke, gliding by colorful fish and curious sea lions, suspended in the wonder of the deep blue. How to manipulate my breath and mold my mouth in the precise ways needed to be able to sing out the sweet notes of songs, making me feel free. My body had been through a lot, but little by little I was learning to trust it again.
And then, BOOM—cancer. Again.
Getting my type of cancer (Anaplastic Large Cell Lymphoma) a second time—especially so many years after the initial diagnosis—is rare. But there it was, eight years later. I recognized the symptoms immediately, but the doctors wouldn’t believe me.
“It can’t be,” they said, “not again. It’s probably just some sort of infectious disease.”
And here I was, going through this same run-around again.
But the difference was, this time, I knew. And I fought for myself.
“No,” I told them, “I’m pretty sure it’s cancer.”
“Pfft,” one doctor even scoffed at me, “you don’t have cancer.”
But finally, three ridiculous months later, I was able to somehow advocate my way into a PET scan, which led to a biopsy, and lo and behold, I was stage IV. By this point, the cancer had started to eat away at my bones. But still, I could revel in a small satisfaction: I had been right all along.
The older I get, the more I realize that I can’t really always trust my body to do what I want it to do or be how I want it to be, no matter how hard I try. But also the older I get, the more I am learning to trust myself. So while it’s harder and harder to trust what my physical, literal gut is going to do these days (hello, medication-induced gastrointestinal side-effects), I am getting better and better—and slightly more confident—in trusting my metaphorical gut; my feelings, intuitions, and convictions.
The physical realm of this existence is unpredictable, hard to control. I’ve been through a lot that has shown me that. But in trying to look for a bright side in all this, I think I’ve finally realized that, while there’s no way to really be able to trust what my body (or anything else in this world for that matter) is going to do, I have become better at trusting my mind to help get me through it. And in so doing, I have also become stronger in my mind, and a better self-advocate. My physical body over time may have become a bit weaker, but overall, my trust in myself and in who I am has never been stronger.
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