Ten Years

Today I turn 46.

And ten years ago this month, I found a lump above my left collarbone while looking in the bathroom mirror.

I remember it clearly. Not a dramatic moment, not a feeling of dread exactly, just noticing something that shouldn't be there and knowing it was something significant. By August I had a diagnosis. Hodgkin's lymphoma. By September I was in chemo, November radiation. By the end of that year I was cancer free.

And I kept right on going.

That's the thing about that year that I've spent a lot of time sitting with lately. Not just the cancer, but everything else that was happening at the same time. A relationship that started fast and felt like everything but in hindsight highlighted a pattern of abandoning myself. Personal losses I didn't have language for yet. A body doing something frightening while I was still in full armor, still running on all cylinders, still absolutely committed to the idea that I could handle everything on my own.

And I did handle it. That's the truth. I moved through that year with a kind of efficiency that I was genuinely proud of at the time. I worked. I went to my appointments. I let one friend or family member come with me to each treatment, rotating them through so everyone got a turn, so nobody had to carry too much, so I didn't have to need any single person too fully.

I shaved my head before the chemo could take my hair. I got ahead of it.

That was me at 36. Always getting ahead of it.

If you had asked me then whether my life was going well, I would have said yes without hesitating.

I had a vice president title. I had a house I'd owned for almost a decade. I had a new car, a promising relationship, a career that was still climbing. On paper, and honestly in my own mind, I thought I had built exactly the life I was supposed to build.

What I didn't know then, or maybe couldn't let myself know, was how alone I actually was.

I had lived in that house for years and never hung anything on the walls. I rarely had anyone over. I kept people at a careful distance, not even intentionally, just out of habit, out of a lifetime of learning that the safest thing, the most comfortable thing, was to need as little as possible from anyone else. I was good at being independent. I had built an entire identity around it.

The cancer let me open the door slightly. I let people drive me to appointments. I let them sit with me. But I didn't let them in, not really. I didn't fall apart in front of anyone. I didn't let it crack me open the way it maybe needed to.

I processed very little of that year while it was happening. The grief of it, and there was so much grief, went somewhere quiet and stayed there. I just kept moving.

That's not a criticism of who I was then. I want to be clear about that.

I am genuinely proud of how I handled that year. The strength it took. The grace under pressure. The way I kept showing up even when everything was harder than I let on. That version of me was doing the absolute best she could with what she had, and she got through something really hard mostly on her own, and that matters.

But I also know now what all of that cost.

The armor that got me through that year was the same armor that kept my life smaller than it needed to be. The hyper-independence that made me so capable also made me unreachable. The perfectionism that kept everything running also kept everything a little hollow. I was achieving, but I wasn't really living. I was getting through, but I wasn't feeling much while I did it.

I didn't know that then. I wasn't connected to my body in a way that would have told me. I was living almost entirely from the neck up, managing and thinking and planning and doing, and the rest of me, the emotional and physical and spiritual rest of me, was just along for the ride.

The dismantling didn't start right away. It took years.

There were small cracks along the way, things that tried to get my attention, but it wasn't until I was 42 that everything really hit. Burnout so complete that I couldn't keep going. A career I had to walk away from. The beginning of a long, slow, uncomfortable process of actually feeling what I had spent decades managing.

That process has looked like a lot of things. Therapy, the consistent long term kind. Breathwork, where things came out of my body that I didn't know were in there, rage and grief and tears that felt like they had been waiting for years. Plant medicine ceremonies where I cried so many tears, like something was finally being released that had been held a very long time. Somatic work. Sound healing. Learning, slowly, how to let people in. Learning that needing someone doesn't make you weak. Learning that the walls I built to stay safe were also keeping out everything I actually wanted.

It has not been a quick or elegant process. I am still in it. I will probably always be in it in some form.

But today, at 46, I am the most at home in myself that I have ever been.

My nervous system, which ran on high alert for most of my adult life, has found a quiet I genuinely didn't know was available to me. I feel my life now in a way I simply didn't before. I have real intimacy, real friendships, a capacity for vulnerability that used to feel impossible. I have hung things on my walls. I have people over. I let myself be known.

I also have less money than I used to. A less certain path. A car that just told me it needs six thousand dollars of work, which is a very unglamorous detail to include in a birthday reflection, but it's real and this is a real story. The leap I took away from my old life has not been without cost. There are days I feel the weight of the uncertainty.

And still, I would not trade it.

Because what I have now, this sense of ease in my own body, this genuine enjoyment of my days, this feeling of actually living rather than managing a life, I didn't have that at 36 with the VP title and the new car and the house with the bare walls. I had the markers of a successful life. I didn't have the life.

Forty six feels a little strange, I'll be honest. There's something about this age that has me more aware of time than I've been before. My parents are getting older. My body is changing in ways I'm still getting used to. There's a particular quality to midlife where you can feel both the weight of what's behind you and the uncertainty of what's ahead, and some days that's a lot to sit with.

But I also know this: the internal stuff, who I am, how I move through the world, my capacity to feel and connect and be present, that is only getting richer. That part is not declining. That part, I believe, will just keep deepening.

And ten years after finding that lump, ten years after the year that was supposed to be the peak of everything I had built, I am just beginning to understand what a full life actually feels like.

That feels worth celebrating.