The butterfly and the bee on swamp milkweed
“By attempting to suppress one emotion, I suppressed them all. Instead of allowing my feelings, I higher-minded or intellectualized them, assumed I could rationalize them into coherence, miraculously make the shame go away, talk myself out of it. Brene’ Brown calls this instinct stockpiling: we might think our feelings are gone but every unexpressed emotion is biding its time in our bodies waiting to come out. When we refuse to listen, to process every icky or hard feeling we’ve shoved down, the experiences don’t evaporate. They metastasize. And what our bodies are trying to tell us becomes harder to parse, like a dialect that’s lost if unspoken. But revisiting the trauma can liberate. As psychotherapist Galit Atlas explains, “When our minds remember, our bodies are free to forget.” Elise Loehnen
Every fear we hold has infinite potential to become resistance that keeps us stuck. We end up moving away from the freedom of living without the fear. I grew up unconsciously believing illness is the manifestation of weakness. Perhaps it began with my ancestor’s inability to stop when they weren’t feeling well. They’d literally die from starvation if they listened to their bodies. If they didn’t fish miles off the coastline, if they didn’t nearly drown to find cod. If they didn’t nearly freeze to death on the ice, while searching for seals, generally unguaranteed hunting, but necessary to feed their family’s tummies for a winter. They couldn’t pay attention to their physical cries for rest because they would perish. Fall down in a heap in the middle of an ice pan. Get lost in the woods. Watch their kids starve. They had to keep going. Keep ignoring their body’s cry. These habits die hard. Sometimes they don’t die at all.
Perhaps my own ignorance was a result of my own generational avoidance of starvation, which continued with my father’s perpetual denial of self, as he forced himself to go to work, day in and out, for sometimes weeks at a time in a logging camp, hours away from their home - leaving my mother to care for her three babies. Was there any other option for him, other than ignoring his grief and PTSD from my uncle’s tragic drowning just after his 21st birthday. Maybe this continued as he proved himself a stronger, better man by ignoring the brewing illness he’d feel warning signs of, transcribing those feelings onto me, a four-year-old, complaining of a tummy ache. My mother would ignore her gut, allowing him to send me to school while unconsciously I’d hear “Man up!” And so I would. And then during the short bus ride home a few hours later, I vomited into my favourite school bag, ruining the sweet present my parents had brought me from their first trip outside Canada, their much delayed honeymoon, to Tennessee.
I remember this to make sense of my past and present actions. I remember to heal. I remember to eventually forgive him for how he made sense of the world. I remember because we must never forget what shapes us.
I was never so scared of my own tendency to deny myself, never so scorned by my heedless actions, as I was when a neurosurgeon at Toronto General hospital told me that brain surgery wasn’t an option - yet. I could not “fix” my growing and uncomfortable symptoms. In fact, the traditional surgery could make things so much worse. During that July appointment in the summer of 2015, he’d detail the low benefit: high risk ratio of slicing across my frontal lobe and removing two growths that albeit small, were growing near by optic nerves. Nerves known for allowing eyesight. I would qualify eventually for something akin to science fiction intervention known as gamma knife radiosurgery, highly recommended due to its minimal risks, but during that time, I wasn’t yet a candidate for this level of scientific technology.
Wes sat beside me, still and mute. He asked no questions, but he was writing everything on his photographic memory, and we’d talk very little about my options, because this was all too scary to discuss any more than we had to. We would ignore it until we couldn’t.
I latched on to Dr. C’s words that day. As if they were scripture from God’s holy book. The meat of his words, being “Your life is very stressful.” He was putting it mildly. I’d built a life that thrived on chaos and proving to the world that I can do anything. (read my blog The Rope ladder). The only way to change my situation was to lower my stress? This wasn’t a solution I had considered before now. Was this a new method of loving myself?
Couldn’t we just do a quick in and out cut? An easy, “pill-like” solution? Back then, my eyebrow lady had told me she’d had a single tumour, not unlike the two that were growing between my eyes. One on each side fits well, if you know me, as I like balance and symmetry. It fits nicely with my chiropractic occupation. She explained hers had also been growing in her frontal lobe. She told me she’d had a procedure whereby the neurosurgeon flipped up her nose, accessing and excising her brain tumour, easily and somewhat effortlessly (as far as a blade and a brain surgery go). She told me it was scary but simple, and she’d healed up within a few months. When I shared this story with Dr. C, he was kind and also blunt.
“I know this technique well,” he said quietly, “I invented it.”
I blinked, paused. I was taken aback that I was in such glorious hands. He continued.
“And it wouldn’t work for the location of your tumours. Frankly, they’re in the wrong location for that procedure.”
Part 2 coming next week
Peace and love my friends,
Jaclyn
I love it when you
Yes Jaclyn that was very scary for me. But the Lord gave me a verse from the Bible.
Wow Jaclyn...powerful stuff and me just reading for the 2nd time When Breath Becomes Air by neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi...he dies of cancer before reaching 40. You write well about living...