Looking after yourself above anyone else

I hate the word resilience. It’s everywhere now – kids need it, adults need it, we apparently need it at work, home, the gym, even the garden plants need it!

There’s an expectation that you can do a course on resiliency and then “HEY PRESTO” you’re a resilient creature ready to face battle.

For me, resiliency is a factor of who we are at the core of our being that says you can do more when you least want to, and when others least expect you to. Testing my resiliency for me has felt like being slammed in the guts with a railway sleeper - doubled over in pain, barely able to breath, and then a car runs into the back of me and takes my legs out. And while I’m lying on the ground in the fetal position, a bird flies past and shits on my head (that has happened by the way – the bird part).

The end part, the ‘results-driven’ part of the resiliency test is whether I can, and want to, get up. Or whether I instead choose to lie there until someone picks me up and carries me to the nearest doctor. Ultimately it comes down to choice. It’s not something that can be taught because it depends on who and what and when. Some people don’t want to get up unassisted because it takes more resolve, strength, and belief than they have in them at that given point in time. And that’s ok. There are times when I have battled within my own mind about whether I need a crane to pick up my zombie-fied existence and dump me back in the fetal position in the comfort of my own bed. And trust me, I have been there. Not within this cancer diagnosis, but a time not so long ago that serves as a constant reminder that at one point in my life, I gave in. Because I needed to.

There is something powerful about surrender. It’s about accepting that sometimes stuff feels a bit bigger than just you. While I would have got an A for Acceptance, the resiliency test score would have come up with a big fat F for Fail. But yet I see it as one of my greatest accomplishments. The fact that I did collapse, I allowed myself to stay down for the count when the TKO was declared, and at some point when I felt I could trust my body to lift my limbs, and my belief in my gut that I could move my legs forward, I got up. It’s a critical part of my story and how I ended up where I am right now. My ability now is to take all that has come my way and wrap it up in a pledge to find where this path may lead, because I clearly didn’t get the message from my previous time in Life’s boxing ring.

What I did learn was that resiliency comes from within. From experience. From belief. And ultimately from the choice we make on a particular day. My choice for today is to get up. My choice for tomorrow is to believe that I can and will get up. And if I can’t, my choice is to nurture and trust that my body is getting exactly what it needs… rest. So that the next day, I can start again.

A bit more about me.

In my past life, prior to this diagnosis of breast cancer, I was immersed in the world of important meetings, structure, routine, coffee breaks and chasing clocks. I was building a career narrative that said I’m making a difference – I was changing the world and fighting for those who couldn’t necessarily fight for themselves. Instead of using my law degree to rack up billable hours, self-fund a lux yacht and push myself into an early heart attack, I worked on changing how government does its business of supporting its people. Everything from child sex abuse, bushfire trauma and recovery, anti-corruption, mental health, alcohol abuse, and domestic violence. I walked tall and proud with my cape under my black skirt suit (with undies on the inside). I felt like I was put on the planet to fix stuff, because I was damn good at it. Implement the impossible project. Meet the impossible timeline. The higher the degree of difficulty, the more I said, “Just watch me”. Unfortunately, I applied that same Ms Fix-It approach to my relationships. I would find the next broken-winged bird to help put them back together but ultimately, every time, I just ended up watching them fly away. They were healed, and I was alone. So, I would dive right back into the next impossible work task and get busy saving the world again.

But three years ago, it was my wing that broke. I was so busy fixing everything else and everyone else, I didn’t even feel the first snap of bone. It wasn’t until I was hanging from the cliff of depression that I realised I had forgotten about how I should be saving myself. And by then it was too late. The person I knew had gone, and instead I was left staring at the face of a stranger. Someone who couldn’t decide whether to have a shower, stay in bed, get dressed, eat, talk. The ins and outs of me going back in time and re-examining that story will come later, because that story is not uncommon. Just like breast cancer. But I write this blog in the knowledge, or at least the gut feel, that the two are not unrelated in my story. The cause of both lies in my absence of compassion. Not for others, and every social justice cause – for those, I delivered compassion in bucket loads. It was the absence of compassion for myself and using the noise of ‘busyness’ to drown out the quiet voices of self-care and self-love.

Cancer, for me, is now history repeating, just with a different punch line. I managed to piece myself back together with what probably resembles a patch up job with sticky tape, because I clearly hadn’t finished healing. The toll now is on my physical health. And ironically (or not), its breast cancer – surely something for women that represents the purist source of nourishment, nurture and love.

I had two choices when I was sitting across from cancer – to invite anger and rage to join in or ask them to quietly leave the room. In the end, it wasn’t a hard choice to make because of the power of a story that could just as easily have been mine. It continues to serve as a sign post that doesn’t say “why me?”, but instead “why not me?”.

The story was gifted to me on my first day of chemotherapy. I was sitting next to a woman, a mother, whose beloved daughter (my age) was going to die in the next 6-12 months. Cancer had returned for the third time in five years. It was a factual story. By the end, the tears were mine, not hers. She wasn’t angry, not one bit. She was instead proud that her daughter was ticking off her bucket list with her husband in quiet surrender to the inevitable injustice that Fate was going to deliver. It was the most graceful ode to acceptance I have ever heard.

And so I chose at that moment to commit to myself that I would do everything I could to change the tone of my story. To accept any and every opportunity I had to find a ‘something’ where others may only see ‘nothing’. This story of mine is still being written, I’m only part of the way there, but that’s all it is – my story. I haven’t set out to represent the collective view of every person who has met cancer or lost someone they love from it.

What I hope to share above all else is that, in amongst a hundred choices that may have been taken away, including how the story may end, we can still choose how we turn each page.

Copyright: Image provided by Marina Locke Photography.