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.