Lately, I think a lot about the lack of confidence I feel. Like a sneaky black mold infestation, it grew silently, behind the walls and under the cabinets, debilitating me slowly, until I noticed a particularly dark spot. Suddenly, upon further investigation, I realized it was everywhere, in everything. I don’t know when I became this shell of a girl.
The full moon got me doing remediation, digging deep into the crevices of my soul. I’m finding grief in hidden corners. I’m finding solutions under the bed. I’m finding that happiness and sadness are both embedded into the structures of these walls and I find myself sitting on the floor to, literally, ground myself daily. I lay on the floor and look up at the art on my computer, now, upside down— maybe I just need a new perspective.
Maybe there’s only so much therapy I can do before I have to do the work of soul searching on my own. After all, no one can fight our inner demons for us. They can only hold our hands and cheer us on from the sidelines.
Something happened to me when I had cancer and it’s so much more than the obvious: tumors and surgeries, and radiation, and, and, and. Every time I think I have covered this internally, I come back to find— “no, in fact you have not”. My psyche screams at me and calls me foolish. What am I avoiding and how can I ever move on?
No, I mean something happened internally, emotionally… as I confronted the idea of mortality, I found myself drowning in fear. Fears of what could be, what would never be, what is and what wasn’t. I spiraled out of control and right before the crash, my confidence flew through the dashboard and got lost in the wind.
What is it about grief that is paralyzing? As I dig deep into this wound, I realize that grief has always been a part of my story. I was in the womb, surrounded by my mother’s grief as she struggled to find the courage to have her first child so soon after losing her own mother so tragically. I was too young to know it was called “grieving” when my parents moved us hundreds of miles from the soil and the flowers I knew to the darkest, most dingiest apartment where snow covered any chance for flowers to ever grow. There was grief when I lost friends to accidents and illnesses, when I said goodbye to my grandfather for the last time on the phone before FaceTime was a thing. Grief seeps out of every wound I’ve ever experienced, and as I run my fingers over the thick scars that are left behind, I doubt they will ever fade.
It was grief that gave way to the anxiety. The constant living in fight or flight. That’s a term I learned in therapy. Where I also made peace with knowing that my parents were swimming against the current— they did the best they possibly could. For every thing I learn, there is another I must unlearn. For example, the belief that I am not doing enough. I don’t know what “enough” is, or who established its quantity, but in my mind, I am always failing at this. Anxiety manifests itself in many ways, like a hand making shadow puppets. Behind a curtain and a single spotlight, she dances her way through “Moth”, “Bear”, “Bull” and for her final trick, “Wolf”. She lunges for my jugular. She takes a bow. The curtains close. But I am not finished.
I used to store my grief in a tiny box that I buried 20 thousand leagues under my heart. I desperately tried to pretend she wasn’t there, and for the most part, that worked for me. But six years ago, a series of events began to unfold that catapulted that box into the open fields of my heart and as it crash landed, grief spilled out and stained me the deepest, richest, most aquamarine shade of blue. There was so much lost and so much gained, I got whiplash just trying to keep up. As I keep digging, I find all these moments in my life, stored in a mason jar like seashells. I sift through them with the urge to pick only the pearly, iridescent ones and cast off the jagged, broken ones that still cut me deeply.
I’m sitting in my bed contemplating the moment everything changed. I can’t tie it to one singular person or event, because I have the sneaking suspicion that it’s the snowball effect of all the years of keeping grief quiet until she could no longer be silenced. She demands that I listen and pay attention. That I accept her place in my life, the ways in which she has inevitably made me stronger and braver and softer. Grief let me make her my enemy. She’s sat in the corner of my room watching as I scorned her. As I wailed in rage and tore off the stars I once hung so delicately on my ceiling. She watched as I made myself smaller and dimmer in retaliation. As if that would make her go away. It didn’t. Grief remained tethered to me like an umbilical cord. And in minimizing myself, I only became a ghost of who I used to be.
Maybe this isn’t obvious to anyone but me. After all, no one knows what they don’t know. People only know what we are willing to share with them. It is my experience that people perceive me a certain way that I often cannot fathom or see. Deep down, I know there is magic in the fleshy structures of my brain. I know I have glitter where most people have cells. The stars in my eyes are permanent, and no matter how broken I feel, I cannot deny the alchemy happening in my DNA. But I wrestle with the notion that there is so much sadness in me and also so much hope. I long to understand where it comes from. How is there hope and why is it in me? My feelings are like bowling balls chained to me and I drag them with me wherever I go. Maybe this is why it feels like it takes me lifetimes to achieve things that I feel shouldn’t be so hard; why I overthink everything, why I stop myself short so many times.
The years I underwent treatment felt like a Great Drought. I had all these seeds of ideas to plant, but the soil was so broken and barren that nothing could actually grow. Everything became so precious and fleeting when I thought I was going to die. I didn’t even realize that after, once the soil was renewed and the flowers all bloomed, my body still remembered.
I’ve had a really hard time adjusting to life “post cancer”. When you’re in it, everyone tells you what to do, what water to drink, what kind of air to breathe. No one tells you what to do after you’ve come out on the other side. No one tells you how to make peace with spots that will pop up on your scans and doctors will advise “just monitoring”. No one tells you how to pick up where you once left off, or that it’s quite literally impossible to do so. No one tells you where to put the excess baggage that was lost and found and then delivered to your door. I’m a stranger in this house that’s missing an organ and I just don’t have room to store memories I’d rather burn up and scatter.
I want to understand why I am different now. Though it may seem like a no-brainer, I want to know. I have this obsession with solving problems and figuring things out. I guess there’s a part of me that wants to understand WHY ME. Why cancer. Why grief. God won’t give me the answer, so I pace, and run circles in my mind, and start to post things, just to overthink myself into a hole and end up hiding. I keep digging and digging and excavating deeper into my soul just to end up with this: maybe “why” is not what’s important.
Being okay with this is a process. Gratitude. Gratitude. Gratitude. When all else fails, gratitude. I suppose confidence ebbs and flows, as do most things in this life. Happiness, love, sadness, rage- they all come and go like the tide, bringing in seashells of magic every time.
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