I’m watching as friends on
Facebook have kids.
I catch myself scrolling more
quickly when I see pictures, announcements, milestones – it’s a double edged
sword.
One side cuts me when I feel
what I’m missing.
The other side cuts me when I
realize that I’m not a good enough person to put myself aside to be happy for
them.
Realizing that you aren’t a
good person can be humiliating, but also life-affirming somehow. Acknowledging this thought makes me feel like I'm being authentic to me - but still...not a good person.
Watching other people have
these experiences makes me think of the continuous downgrading of the silver
lining that I’ve been finding the last 4 years.
At first diagnosis, I wasn’t
informed enough to be grateful because I didn’t know how bad things could get.
It’s funny now because then I
was sad thinking that -post-mastectomy- I wouldn’t be able to breast feed. That’s
no longer relevant.
Cancer started as a blip on
the screen of my life – that was the original silver lining.
Getting over a hump to the
other side – that’s a pretty good goal.
Years have fallen off and now, my
tolerance for bad things seems to have increased.
When I was leaving work for
my biopsy in September of 2013, a colleague told me that it was probably a cyst
filled with fluid that they would aspirate.
“OMGGGG…that’s so gross! Where does the fluid go?”
That was
literally the worst thing I could think of at that moment. Four years later, I’ve
experienced way grosser things….bone biopsies, a double mastectomy, drains, radiation
burns, Faslodex shots (honestly…way grosser than they seem), going through
menopause at 28 – it’s not pretty.
What holds it together is the
stark realization that it can be worse…and that, for me, it will get worse
someday.
This thought leaves me
grasping at positivity straws everyday:
I still have my hair
I still have my mind
I can still walk, move, work,
drive
I have my life, my family, my
friends
I have the power of appearing
normal
I want more than this – I want
what I presumably could have had, but at the same time, I could not ask for
more.
