Busy making other plans
2023 had a lot of difficult moments. It felt like a red letter year. My siblings and parents and dear friends had significant health challenges, some really wonderful people in our lives died and our hearts still ache about it. Also a bunch of less big deal dumb stuff too happened like fender benders, whiplash, hail damage, replacing roofs, and vehicles and so, so, so much insurance paperwork. All of this was going on while I was managing another career pivot back to independent work and getting our oldest ready for senior year and post-high school. Whew.
I felt so ready for a 2024 reset and feeling like I had a clear plan and was working my plan.
What is that thing they* say?
Life happens while you are busy making other plans
The first week of January, I relaunched my business and new website, scheduled my first international trip in 12 years, and was up to my elbows in dreams, budgets, visions. Almost exactly two weeks later I was diagnosed with early stage breast cancer after my regularly scheduled mammogram. Breast. Cancer. Oof and ugh.
The good news is: I am going to be fine. It is very early and I have great care and feel really optimistic that I’m gonna get through this pretty easily.
And also, there are a million other things I would rather be dealing with right now than this. There are so many things I am doing! I have shit to do, people!
And also, this is the thing I have to do right now. What is that other thing they say? No way around but through.
Isn’t that life though?
I’m sitting here writing this right now and thinking about you,
and you,
and you,
and you (so many of you).
And I KNOW all that you are managing in your life, have managed in your life, and how you do it with courage, humor, patience, sometimes rage, almost always messiness, and enormous love. I also know how much you are lifting up the people around you - even in the middle of all of that.
You are doing a really good job, even when it sucks. You inspire me, a lot. Just out there being your human self and I want to thank you for the example. I need it.
I debated sharing this news beyond my inner circle, on the internet and whatnot, asked my family what they thought, and ultimately decided that sometimes this is what I do when I don’t know what to do: I write. Writing my experience helps me to process it, sharing it makes me feel less alone, it helps me drop into gratitude instead of fear, because it makes me think of you, and you, and you, and you, and you, and I draw a lot of strength from watching how you show up in your life. And I’ve also clung to other people’s writing and hearing their first-hand experiences to help me navigate these last few weeks. So why not share?
And I’m curious: what helps you through? What are the things you always come back to when dealing with illness, grief, challenge, fear? What do you turn to again and again when the world or your days feel hard?
What is that other thing they* say?
Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid.
*These quotes feel so common but turns out they are (in order) attributed to John Lennon from his song Beautiful Boy, Robert Frost’s poem A servant to servants, and Frederick Buechner, a theologian who I really don’t know anything about but now am curious about. Ultimately, I prefer Maggie Smith’s variation on this theme in her poem “Good Bones”. I’m also grateful to have a wee little practice in somatics to help center and ground in the body, loving reading Abigail Rose Clarke’s Returning Home to Our Bodies to contemplate the beauty of how gravity and anatomy holds us all. And I am also grateful these days to Audre Lorde for writing her Cancer Journals, of which she said: “I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood.”
