When I tell my clients why they need to hire me, it’s always for a single reason: they need a brand story, and they’re the very worst people in the world to write it.
Because they’re in it. They’re living it in real time. Feeling every moment of it, every day.
Which means they can’t see it. They’ve got no objective distance. No ability to get outside of the sensory rush of the inner chaotic workings and observe it for what it is. Which is why they need me.
Well. Right now I’m doing the thing I make my money counseling clients against.
I’m in it right now. And all I can think to do is write.
18 days ago I was afraid I might be dying.
It was an overly-anxious, overly-dramatic reaction, I knew.
But I was still afraid.
I’d just gotten my first mammogram. The tech warned me in the room not to panic if I got called back in for a second diagnostic. I had no baseline. There was no way for the doctor to know what “normal” was for me. I smiled and thanked her and mostly dismissed it.
Then later that same day I got a call from my doctor telling me I needed to go in for a follow-up mammogram and an ultrasound. “They found a mass in the right breast. I just sent in the order to the imaging center, but they won’t get it until the morning. So call them then.”
She was relatively hurried on the phone. My mind went blank. My insides felt cold. I couldn’t think of any questions.
I hung up. I skipped a work meeting and paced my condo. I called the office back to ask if she could explain anything more about it or what to expect next. She wasn’t there – she’d just left for the July 4 weekend.
I called the imaging center the next morning. The quickest they could get me in was two weeks.
Will is the boy I fell in love with two and a half years ago. Six days after putting in an offer on my condo here in Key West. Two weeks before closing on it. When I told him about my mammogram results, he did his best to reassure me. And I needed reassurance.
He was leaving in three days to climb two mountains in Washington. It felt like he had just gotten back from a couple weeks away climbing mountains in Ecuador. We’d been working through a truth about us that the past few months had thrown into uncomfortable focus. Will at his core craves being alone. Living alone. Adventuring alone. My core craves togetherness. Building a life together. Making a home together.
In my mind, from the beginning, our story had been a fairytale. The reason for all the pain of 2019 and 2020. The forever-serendipity that had been waiting for me at the southernmost point. And that story – along with many truly joyous times we spent together – helped me rationalize things that were hard. The postponement of living together. The waiting to see what adventures he’d plan, and where I would fit in…if I would fit in. The overnight bag I packed each day after work. It had eerie overtones with the way I had lived, and the lessons I’d learned, in 2019. But what was different was him. What was different was us.
Before Will left for his Washington trip, a couple days after my first mammogram came back, I told him what I needed from him: to feel welcome and invited into his home, wherever in the world that turned out to be, even if we didn’t live together. And – since we were facing so much alone time with the mountaineering he had planned – for our together-time to be as intentional and concrete and planned as our time apart. I was shaking when I asked it. I was desperate for my ask to be true enough for me, and light enough for him, that the feelings I’d been having for months…a vague, stomach-churning intuition that the away-time he was having was making him crave more, not less…could be tamped down and explained away. I held my breath after I stopped talking. He told me he loved me so much, and he could do those things for me. I felt a wave of relief. We were okay. Which meant that, for a moment, I was okay.
I dropped him at the airport at the crack of dawn the next morning and kissed him goodbye. And I started waiting for my second appointment.
There were moments when I felt anxiety so intense I had to turn off my zoom video and lie down on the couch, or on the floor. I called Truman crying. I left a gathering on the beach in a $90 Uber because I started to have a panic attack.
For two weeks, that was how I lived. And I started to think about what it would mean to find out I was sick. What it would be like not to be able to exercise. Not to be able to work. Not to be able to have adventures outdoors. Not to be or do or pursue any of the things that make me feel alive.
I had those thoughts and went through on-and-off despair surrounded – literally and figuratively – by my closest friends. I had those thoughts and went through the despair without Will. He was on a mountain, out of range of service.
The day of my follow-up appointment, July 13th, I cried all morning. I cried when the mammogram tech asked me how I was doing. I cried when the nurse who did my ultrasound asked whether I’d recently been sick or had a vaccine when she saw how large my right-side lymph node was. I stared up at the shitty hospital ceiling and felt more alone than I ever have.
The doctor read my scans while I waited. And I’m fine. My lymph node on the right is big, just like the one on the left is big. I got a clean bill of health and a walk out to my car from my nurse. I hugged her tight. I called Truman and burst into tears. I drove home and watched the sun come out after a rainstorm and felt euphoric. I was alive. I could do anything. My life was mine to live again.
Yesterday Will came home from his Washington travel. I picked him up at the airport and drove him home. Things didn’t feel quite right. He sat next to me on the couch and said we needed to talk. He’d had a lot of time alone to think about it. He can’t give me what I need and what I deserve. He needs to live and navigate this next portion of his life alone. He wishes he could change the way he feels. But he can’t.
My mind went blank. My insides felt cold. I had so many questions that it wasn’t even worth starting to ask them.
He cried. I cried. I stood up, said goodbye without looking at him, and left the person I thought could be my forever person.
The pain of the last two days has been wild. That too-familiar feeling of “I can’t believe it…of course I can” is back. I can’t sleep. I can’t focus. I can’t use my fairytale story to soften the edges of reality. Reality is the only story left.
And more than once in the past two days, I’ve wished to close my eyes and not wake back up.
The hurt is so profound. The denial is coursing through me. Rage and despair and desperate, desperate sadness are weighing down every inch of me.
And I’m feeling all of it. All of it.
Because I’m alive.
I’m alive.
The news I got yesterday brought me to my knees.
The news I got Thursday saved me.
“We all have two lives. The second begins the moment we realize we only have one.”
