Sept 13, 2012 - Day # 36 - Your story will heal you.

Day 36:  My friend, Caroline, sent a quote this morning. "When you stand and share your story in an empowering way, your story will heal you and your story will heal somebody else."
~ Iyanla Vanzant

Powerful, huh? When I sent my very first update on August 10 day #3 all I knew was I was very broken and facing a journey that I didn't think I wanted to tackle alone. I had to decide if I was going to crawl into a very private hole with my family and shelter myself from potential embarrassment, pity, and even judgment since my case was controversial. Putting something so personal as a mastectomy all out there for the world to see and judge could result in a personal disaster. I didn't know if I was ready for that. Under normal circumstances, I live a very compartmentalized life. Work separate from home separate from friendship separate from church and so on. And that works for me on a lot of levels. If one dam breaks, the rest of the compartments remain in tact and fully functional. Right or wrong, and most likely wrong, this is how I traversed my course. About a year ago, about the same time that I switched jobs, I decided to challenge that way of life. For the first time, I was going to open up the gates and let my life compartments start merging themselves into a soup of Sally. It was a scary moment for me as now I only had one compartment and if that one compartment broke, nothing was safe.
Quickly, I realized if I wanted to say I trusted God, I had to trust Him with every piece of Sally. How could I let God use me as a vessel if I so carefully guarded and maintained the individual gates of my life? So, After a ton of thought, I decided to open this journey to you. The quote above summed it up perfectly when I read it today. I needed to be emotionally healed and I do that best through discussion with others. But doing that face to face is still a stretch for me. So facebook (and now this blog- Thanks Amy for creating it) became a journal for me. I could keep all the people updated that were inquiring and still document my story for myself as a sense of processing and healing.  But boy was that first post oh so very hard to do. And you will notice towards the middle of my journey, the posts became much less formal and more transparent in the rawness of my emotions. I truly believe journeys are meant to be open and honest (as long as they don't cause damage to someone) if we are to allow God to use them in any way he sees fit. Hard for me to write, hard for me to entrust my story to you, and hard for you to read maybe on occasion. But maybe through my healing of self, there may be some healing of your own story. Some of your emails have already shown that to be the case. (i'm hoping one day you, too, will share your stories). So here comes more transparency.

Last night, after my post about Barkley (the new spot), it was time to start the cleaning ritual of the wound. I went to the bathroom, disrobed, closed my eyes and let Ron swab the area. Ron asked the simplest of questions. "Sally, what is it with this scar that bothers you so much?". Then, the flood gates opened and I started balling again. A down to the core heart wrenching cry. I really thought those days were long gone. It had been two weeks since I had cried. Well, that record is now set back to zero.This cry lasted a bit. I was embarrassed by it, and I couldn't explain it. The simplest of questions that had not a simple answer. When I was able to pull myself and my thoughts back together, I tried to rationalize that all out. Why was the reconstruction still bothering me? And why did I feel guilty for having these emotional outbursts (because usually I'm such a rational thinker). I knew I was paralyzed by this wound because of it's placement. Being at the base of my incision meant I couldn't address the wound myself because that would force me to look in a mirror at the impostor, it's scar, and the wound. What I didn't have all figured out was why these incisions can bring me to my worst.

I understood back in august, before reconstruction started, why a concave breastless chest could bring me, and I imagine any other woman in the same shoes, to awful emotional pain. That seemed very cut and dry. I lost something "normal" and replaced it with nothing. All I could see was what used to be (perfectly normal) and what was now (anything but normal). My femininity was lessened. And unexpectedly for whatever reason that created havoc on my everything. I never expected myself to be so vulnerable to that type of thinking, but it unavoidably crushed me. What I do not fully understand now is why after reconstruction when femininity has been somewhat restored I am still broken by the battle scars. Maybe it's just still too fresh. Maybe the new boob itself isn't what brings the restoration. My friend told me she too was initially paralyzed by the incisions and process, but over time her scars became highly cherished. Battle scars of the triumph. I hope to get there. But for now, I'm left trying to understand it all. I can only fathom that my looking at the scars just pulls back all the intense emotions of what got me here with all the rawness of July and August (See post titled Day 0 Part 2 as a preface). Right now, they are a continual reminder of what I have now done in such a short amount of time. And until I fully embrace all of that and heal from the day to day journey, these scars are not yet a medal of honor (I definitely can see where this would be the case for a breast cancer survivor. My own abdominal scar shows I kick lymphoma in the toosh.), but just a reminder of the rawness I am still experiencing subconsciously. I didn't defeat breast cancer. I dodged breast cancer and never gave it a chance. Instead of going to battle, I never signed up for the draft. There is very little feeling of personal triumph in that. I understand there is some bravery in the understanding that there may not be many woman that would choose to lop off perfectly good boobs, but I don't feel any braver (yet). I feel a little damaged.

I know my feelings will morph as weeks go by. I know there is a lot to be said for choosing the crazy decision. It shows I wanted to put my husband first and not make him suffer through the awful course of watching a spouse struggle with a diagnosis. It shows I wanted to choose life over probability. It shows I trusted God and how this all came about. His hand is all over this fast paced adventure. I know these words carry truth, but right now, I still feel the brokenness of the journey. Why breasts can carry so much emotion (cause I never gave them a single thought prior to June 2012), I am just now learning to understand. It's truly an unexpectedly complex journey, and I imagine each decade in life will bring a different perspective. No doubt my story will fade back into nothing as each month passes. There will come a point when I rarely give it a second thought (as with my lymphoma, cleft lip, knee surgery, etc).

My future blog posts have their days numbered. It's right around the next corner that you will come to this page and see nothing. This always happens. I hope your story will replace mine. Until then, I'm working to glean whatever I can from mine for what ever reason and intent this story may carry from here on. I'm still healing and that was very evident in the simplest of questions last night that had not a simple answer.

 "When you stand and share your story in an empowering way, your story will heal you and your story will heal somebody else."
~ Iyanla Vanzant



Click  www.tradinginthetatas.blogspot.com to access other posts.