Pivot

Yesterday was surgery day.

I’m feeling more settled with my body being such a central aspect of who I am right now, which is good because it absolutely is central to who I am right now. I don’t mean my internal self, I mean how I move through the world and how people think and talk about me. Friday morning, day three after the bad news, I’m rereading my entry from the night before and realized that I’m managing my social media profile, working to control the story. I’m still making sense of this, and I wanted to convey that sense of incompletion in my post – how scattered I still am by it. I was telling a friend that if my life was not as solid as it is, if my relationship with C was rocky, or if I was single, or if I really hated my job, that this crisis could have precipitated a bad period in my life. It feels like a pivotal moment. As I wrote, there have been a number of these calamitous moments, so unexpected, so unusual, but most of them happened a long time ago, before I awoke to myself. I have no emotional memory of failed cross-match in 2002, or losing my Mom’s kidney to the neurofibroma.

I’ve worked to be present and intentional about how I process the circumstances of my body, but this one is testing me. I’m feeling so many different and contradictory things about this. I feel lucky – I do – phenomenally lucky. I am supported by hundreds of people, and now by many strangers. My vulnerability compounds this support. I am more and more encouraged to risk being vulnerable, to tell my story, to accept this madness as part of who I am. And every time I do that I am rewarded with support, and ultimately transformed relationships with incredible people, some of who share similar stories. I'm working to embrace the disruption - on Saturday I tried yoga! And it was great! 

At the same time I’m feeling angry that this happened. And, more deeply, I feel a profound dread that I will never feel healthy again. The anger is in my chest, the dread in my gut. For three years I've anticipated the transplant as an abatement of what has felt like a perpetual health crisis. I stumbled on the blog of Nora McInerny Purmort (many of you already know and love her), who has written about her husband’s brain tumor and death here - this particular link was posted a few days ago. She wrote about the mess of grief and articulated a number of thoughts I’ve been kicking around, especially how being angry is feels gross and unproductive but to feel it anyway. And that it is “not my job to make my life more palatable to other people.” I’m on an unavoidably human journey, and, as I’m realizing, the more human the better. What does human mean? Whatever contradictory thing I am in that moment! And more, more of it! Thanks for reading.