Lessons, Love, Life Vests, and Lighthouses

Last week I had a double mastectomy. For those previously unfamiliar, I have been on my journey to heal my breast cancer since my diagnosis last September. I was diagnosed with a triple-positive form of breast cancer which means that there are three main signaling pathways that the cancer cells utilize to grow: estrogen, progesterone, and a growth factor called HER2. I underwent six rounds of chemotherapy between November and February leading up to my surgery last week. I will continue immunotherapy to target the HER2 pathway for six more months and will begin a regimen to suppress my ovaries and put me into a medically-induced menopause in order to deplete my body of estrogen and progesterone made by my ovaries, all of which are intended to reduce my risk of recurrence along with the mastectomy that was performed to remove all of my breast tissue.

The one thing that anyone who has had or been close to someone with cancer can tell you is that uncertainty is the name of the game. Upon initial diagnosis, despite the many scans and tests run, definitive staging of the cancer remains uncertain until pathology is analyzed from surgery. Let me explain. Ultrasound-guided imaging is done in the initial breast cancer diagnosis process to take approximate measurements of the tumor size and look for the presence of masses in the surrounding lymph nodes. A biopsy of the mass is taken during the ultrasound in order to confirm whether the mass seen in the imaging is benign or malignant. MRI scans are then taken to more accurately assess the size and location of the tumor as well as presence of cancer in the lymph nodes. My staging was estimated to be stage 1 during the ultrasound. MRI confirmed I was actually stage 2 based on the more accurate measurement of the tumor size. All methods of imaging come with what is known as a threshold for detection. MRI is quite sensitive and can detect masses that are fairly small; however, the presence of a few cancer cells can still be missed in MRI scans because they are below the machine’s threshold for detection. Therefore, tissue sampling taken during surgery is the only accurate way of truly discerning what the stage of cancer is. Staging is just one example of a large area of uncertainty for many cancer patients.

Every step of the cancer treatment journey comes with an onslaught of uncertainty. What stage your cancer actually is (despite what it is best estimated to be), whether your treatment regimen will be effective and how brutal it will feel, what caused your cancer in the first place, whether you have made the right choice on what surgical route you’ve chosen to take, whether your surgeries will go as planned, whether your cancer will return or not, what your life and your vitality will look and feel like at each turn, and in my case and the cases of many female cancer patients in childbearing years, what your ability or path to motherhood could be. Any amount of certainty you attempt to grasp at slips right through your fingers.

As a person who has been strategized from childhood to idolize certainty above almost all else, this has been arguably the most difficult lesson in this battle. My childhood was spent trying to anticipate and adapt to the erratic behaviors of the adults around me so that I could react accordingly in order to stay safe and get my needs met. I clung to anything that felt certain in my life because those were the only pockets in my life that I felt I wasn’t bracing myself for disaster. Those were the pockets I felt I could exhale and where the world wasn’t going to imminently collapse around me.

My childhood primed me to be both familiar with and wildly triggered by uncertainty. My relationship to it remains complex to this day. I spent the majority of my adult life carefully curating pockets of my life to have stability, security, and as much certainty as I could get my hands on. I gunned for perfect grades, honor roll, a path to the highest level of education I could achieve, ergo a path to what I believed would be financial security, a golden-handcuffs relationship and eventual marriage with a man that wanted all the traditional milestones of the American dream, and a comfortable job at a great company that afforded me a fair amount of financial and job security.

Conversely, I mentioned that I am both familiar with and triggered by uncertainty. My trauma response to uncertainty is both creating security and feigned “assurance” in all the aforementioned areas of my life while simultaneously and in opposition to that quest for security, choosing people and relationships in my life that best mirror the uncertainty that I experienced growing up. Unless we go back and heal the trauma, we end up unconsciously choosing familiar people and situations in our adult lives as a way to replay and redo what happened in childhood to try and rectify the ending that left us in pain.

When I was very young, my parents divorced. They shared custody and visitation of me equally. I don’t share this part of the story to blame or shame my parents, as I believe that they did the best they could with the way they were resourced to handle their trauma and pain, or rather lacking resourcing, at that time. My dad didn’t take the most connected approach to parenting me during his visitation time, often being consumed with his own endeavors and preoccupied with his own needs and his own experiences and pain. I remember being excited to go to his house and see and spend time with him. I would be looking forward to all the ways we could spend time together and the adventures I dreamed up that we could go on. I can recall with clarity many times, but one time in particular that stands out, where I would ask him for something and get with almost one-hundred percent accuracy the same response. Sometimes I would ask for sleepovers, or to go to see movies, or anything else a young girl would be excited to go and do. In this particular instance, I remember I was pretending to figure skate in my driveway, riding on my roller skates, pretending to do spins as if I was on-ice. I had become enamored with the sport and wanted to learn how to skate the way my cousin did and the way the skaters did on television. I had decided I wanted to take ice skating lessons. My dad often worked outside in the garage on weekends, organizing or fixing things. I rolled my way over to him and with all the excitement I could muster, asked him if I could take ice skating lessons. His answer, as with almost every request I ever made, was “Maybe, we’ll see”. As a child, when you first hear those kind of words, you remain in a state of hopefulness. Maybe he just needed to look into where he might enroll me for lessons. Maybe he just needed to consult the request with my mom. Maybe he just needed to make sure they could afford it. He would habitually never bring the subject up again to avoid giving me an answer to my request. As with all these instances, I would, in the throes of my childhood excitement, keep asking him. My persistence would annoy him. His answer always remained the same. Over time and with age, I came to understand that “Maybe, we’ll see” always meant “No, but I just don’t want to be bothered to have the hard conversation and tell you no right then and there to your face”. He put off the inevitable disappointment while my nervous system learned to acclimate to living in a constant state of uncertainty when making a request of a loved one or a bid for connection. I learned that maybe always eventually meant no. My body learned to believe that love meant accepting a great deal of uncertainty and a lack of clarity. I quickly learned that I needed to be the adult because I could not rely on the adults around me to show up solid for me. My childlike frivolity and vulnerability were not safe to embody, and slipped away often, being replaced with rigidity and practicality.

Because the rest of my childhood and adulthood were spent with this programming around what uncertainty meant to me and an established  high threshold for its tolerance, I continued to attract people into my space that mirrored that experience of uncertainty back to me.

Once the cancer happened, I had to ask myself how this all tied together. I don’t believe in coincidences, so I set out to try and make sense of what the common thread through it all was. Over the past years, I have spent a lot of time thinking about why certain people experience the difficult life events they do, and what the point of our existence is. What I have come up with that makes sense for me is that our souls come to this earth to ultimately learn how to master two things: love and lessons. I believe we make certain agreements with God before we come here about what kinds of experiences we are willing to endure in order to gain the perspective we need from them about the lessons our souls are still trying to master. I think my soul definitely came to this earth to learn that control and certainty are both illusions that we as humans often lean on for a feeling of safety. It’s not until those are both taken away that we are forced to source that safety from somewhere else.

Cancer asked me to reevaluate what I was tethering myself to when the storms hit. It asked me to finally wake up and realize that I have always been and will always be my own life vest. I don’t need to cling to things or people to stay afloat. That is a Me + God job. 

Before my diagnosis, I had found myself in love with a man who, although not exactly like my father, possessed the exact ability to hold me in the purgatory of “Maybe, we’ll see” any time I made a request or a bid for connection with him. I had become so twisted up in anguish over what that relationship meant to me and stuck trying to make sense of what I was supposed to learn from his presence as well as his absence that my body was in a perpetual state of distress. I realized that I had unknowingly entered into a dynamic that perfectly reflected the trauma around uncertainty I had experienced growing up. “Maybe, we’ll see” had shown up again, twenty-some years later asking yet again to be reckoned with. I know for certain that this relationship as well as my cancer both showed up to reveal to me what I needed to heal in my complex relationship to the idea of uncertainty and vulnerability.

What I now realize as an adult that I was unable to make out as a child is that when someone tells me “Maybe, we’ll see”, it never hangs on whether or not I am inherently good enough to show up for. “Maybe, we’ll see” was never because I was not good enough to show up for, but rather because they could not count on themselves to be “good enough” on that particular day to show up solidly and follow through on the request that was made of them. They said “maybe” because they themselves were uncertain of their ability to do or be what was asked of them.

In the same breath, I also have to admit that if I believe that our purpose for existing is to master both lessons and love, this man’s presence in my life also brought my soul light-years closer to learning how to master love than I was before I met him. Both his presence and absence in my life have been wise teachers in my quest to learn how to love more in the likeness of God. Even though I know part of the experience in my relationship with him was to help me see and heal my trauma around uncertainty, I believe the other part was to experience what it feels like to love and stand for someone even when they are unable to offer me anything real or solid in return. I believe this was my first tangible experience of unconditional love. I loved him inclusive of both his immense light and the depth of his shadows, as well as ultimately his inability to return the love and solidity back to me that I had offered him. Perhaps I have always had the capacity for unconditional love before, but this was truly the first time I have been put in a position to test and witness it. The people I have loved deeply in either a romantic, friendship, or familial capacity have always in some way returned that love back to me. I think this was the first time in my life that I loved someone with the understanding that there was likely little to nothing in it for me.

The way that this man’s soul crashed into mine was unlike anything I was prepared for. Lessons aside, he woke up a part of me that had been asleep my whole life. He showed me a great deal of his heart and soul, and although what we had wasn’t solid or lasting, I do believe our souls recognized and understood each other with no translation. I believe my soul also came here to experience that in this life. I have been asking and craving my whole life for more evidence of what it feels like to be in the presence of humans where the soul connection is so strong that no translation is needed. Whether or not love has anything to do with that, I know my soul came to earth to find other souls that feel like home to me. There is certainty in that.

In the last six months, my cancer has excruciatingly sorted out for me who I can count on for solidness and certainty and who I cannot, but I think the bigger lesson is that it has removed my ability to create false senses of certainty in things or people, and ultimately forced me to source my certainty from my higher self and from God. I have always been a deeply feeling and highly intuitive person, and I think that people with strong internal senses need strong warning signals. I think cancer was that for me. A strong warning signal that a few of the biggest lessons I came to earth school to learn were past-due. It was time to learn how to recalibrate my relationship to uncertainty. It was time to learn how to source a sense of safety and certainty in myself and my connection to a higher power, and it was time to learn some of the painful but beautiful lessons on the path to mastering love. Cancer became my internal guidance system, warning me when I was acting in opposition to what honors myself, my values, and my worth. I believe my cancer showed up as a catalyst asking me to be in charge of my healing at a soul-level so that I can become my own source of certainty and my own life vest when the storms roll in. It showed up as a catalyst asking me to become more connected to and reliant upon my relationship with God, rather than thinking it’s all on me or chance to make things work out in my life. It showed up as a catalyst asking me to have a higher regard for my inner child’s need for safety in expression of my vulnerability and in my choices about who it is safe to share that part of myself with. It showed up as a catalyst asking me to recognize and honor that one of the most beautiful parts of my soul is my ability to stay vulnerable, authentic, and committed to love and gratitude, even in the midst of the most brutal storms.

Although I find myself more on the spiritual than traditionally-religious end of the spectrum these days, I continue to lean heavily on a bible verse that serves as a reminder that I am tethered to something solid in the midst of the storms.

“For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.”

-Jeremiah 29:11

In these things I feel certainty:

Cancer is a brutally beautiful guidance system that showed up in perfect timing for me.

My solidness and certainty comes from my connection to myself, to God, and to my responsibility for my own healing.

God has some kind of beautiful but mysterious plan for my life and my existence.

I was made to love deeply, boldly, vulnerably, and unconditionally.

My soul has a sonar that guides me to the people who have souls that feel like home to me. While I have learned I am not tethered to those souls for safety, they do serve as lighthouses in the storm.

Big Love Y’all,

E.