I’ve hardly written anything these last few weeks. My life, all of a sudden, has felt like it has started to right itself around me, to get back onto an even keel. Finishing my chemotherapy has opened everything back up, all those things which have been closed off for me and that I have been closed off from. I have a date for starting my phased return to work, my husband and I have had a long awaited and much needed holiday, we have been seeing friends again, making plans.
I don’t exactly know how I feel about all this…. Part of me is overjoyed, another part is utterly overwhelmed. I feel unbelievably lucky to be in a position to begin to live my life again, but at the same time I am unsure about how to reclaim my place in the world. I feel like I don’t quite fit anymore in the space that I vacated, all those many months ago. I have stepped back into the mainstream, but I can’t yet submerge myself in the fast running water, can’t let it carry me with it. And so, life feels as if it flows around me: I am in it, but not of it. I find I am able to make all the right noises, can mimic my life from before all this, but something has shifted. I am changed.
I had an appointment this morning with a physiotherapist as part of a local scheme to support cancer patients’ physical fitness before surgery and recovery following treatment. I am now in the ‘rehab’ phase and have found myself throughout the day pondering this word: rehabilitation. I understand its implications in my context - building up my physical strength, shoring up my emotional resilience and wellbeing, all with the aim of returning to life I had - and I understand why it’s important. But it somehow sits a little uneasily with me.
The Oxford Dictionary definition of the word is, “the action of restoring someone to health or normal life through training and therapy after imprisonment, addiction, or illness.” And, don’t get me wrong, I do want to be restored to health and normal life. But I’m also afraid that this action of restoring will somehow erase what it is I have been through. I’m not sure I’m ready to let go of that yet.
The practitioner talked about how normal it is to feel that your identity has changed, but that this would pass, that I would get back to who I was before. I knew what she meant, but I don’t know. I’m not sure going back to and restoring my former self is either possible or desirable. I have spent so much time coming to a new understanding of who I am now, given so much of my self during this journey, that don’t want to undo all that. I can’t go back. I have re-written what it means to be me.
And so, whilst I nod in agreement, whilst I make plans in the way I used to, whilst I seem to be getting back to who I was before, inside I know that things will never be the same. At least, that’s what I feel at the moment. And maybe that will change. But I am moving forward with my scars clutched close to my heart, and I will them not to fade. They are part of who I am now, this re-written and reconstructed me, and I am unashamed of these breaks and cracks that reside within me. They remind me of my fragility, but also my strength. Here I am; this different, uncertain, re-written me, here I am.
