A Beautiful Thing Will Grow Out of This Very Hard Thing

Sometimes beautiful things live inside the very hardest of things.



Yesterday, for the first time in a very long while, I ventured outside alone to go to the corner store. I wanted to see if it was open so that I could buy something cheap and sweet, but the store was closed. It was only a short block I had to walk to get there, but I felt so exposed, so far from my nest of safety, that my collar bones ached with the tightness in my throat and chest.

I am sometimes afraid to leave my home.



This fear happens when I am shifting, when I am changing my patterns of thought or behaviour. I panic, and my panic turns inward, where I question all the good of which I am capable. I have spent a week sure that I cannot write or make or do valuable things, that my faultiness far outweighs my abilities.

This insecurity is usually followed by the hatred of my own appearance, and this week was no exception. I became convinced that my own appearance was so terrible, so below acceptable standards, that I did not want to be seen by strangers who did not already love me.

"I can't go out," I sometimes say. "Strangers will see my face, and I can't have that."



I came home from my harrowing trip to the corner store with that familiar burn of shame running up the back of my neck while I tried to catch my breath, and I immediately asked the Palinode to come for another, slightly longer walk with me. I knew that my well-being depended on killing this thing in the moment.

I know my mind. If I let leaving be so terrible that it scares me back, and then rest into my safe spot on the couch again, I will more deeply train a pathway in my brain that confirms the messages that Leaving Is Bad and Staying Is Good. I imagined myself in the future on a talk show saying "I don't know how it happened, but one day I just stopped leaving, and now it's been 17 years since I walked out my front door."



The Palinode and I walked to another drugstore further away, and as we chatted about things like whether grease is wet or dry¹ and what the actual elements of moisture are, my chest loosened. The stuck feeling in my throat eased up.

That pathway in my brain, one that could have so easily become a deeper groove, unkinked itself a little bit. I bought myself some more time with freedom.



I haven't said much about my depression, anxiety, or addiction issues over recent months. As much as I've written about them before and talked about them in front of audiences across two countries, I am afraid to write about them here.

I am afraid that no one will believe me anymore that shame can be used to see rather than punish yourself, that your courage is bigger than you know, and that fear is surmountable. I am afraid that I don't have what it takes to stay on this path I have fought so hard to find and bushwhack my way through. I am afraid that people will second-guess hiring me, thinking that I am not up to the job.

Part of my job on this earth, though, and I deeply hold this to be true, is to be very publicly human.

I do have the strength, though. We all do. This is a bones deep knowledge I can't shake.

I'm just experiencing retreat after battle, or, as Brené Brown calls it in I Thought It Was Just Me, a "vulnerability hangover". You shouldn't trust someone who hasn't lived their subject, and so I'm treating this phase of change as intensive study. I'm diving in.

In the end, Ghandi said it most succinctly²:

We but mirror the world. All the tendencies present in the outer world are to be found in the world of our body. If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. This is the divine mystery supreme. A wonderful thing it is and the source of our happiness. We need not wait to see what others do.

This course I take repeatedly through anxiety, depression, and the hard work of sobriety is difficult and terrible at times, but the most beautiful parts of my whole life grow out of the soil it helps me to turn over.

Fear is gripping, but love and belief birth hope, growing capital-c Courage larger than the self.

And, so, a beautiful thing will grow out of this very hard thing, and you will not see me on a show in 17 years wondering why I never left my home again in all that time. This, I can promise you.

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<sup>1. It turns out that grease is a non-Newtonian fluid that can be both wet and dry. Thanks goes to brainiac @jannymarie for the information. ↩

2. This paragraph is often paraphrased as "be the change you want to see in the world", which is an unverified misquote that Ghandi never actually said, because he didn't speak Bumper Sticker. ↩</sup>

Get Swabbed for Cervical Health Awareness Month

This week, I want you to think about your cervix. If you don't have one of your own to think about, I want you to think about the cervix of someone close to you. Why? Because January is Cervical Health Awareness Month! It's the most common cancer found in women under 35 (in the UK), and an ounce of cervical cancer prevention is worth a pound of cure. I know, because I had a hysterectomy in 2007 to cure my cervical cancer.



Cervical Health Awareness Month has put me right back in 2007, the year I found out that I had cervical cancer. In 2007, I hadn't had a Pap smear, let alone a physical, since the Palinode and I were married in 2001, and, truth be told, I avoided them. Due to various personal issues, which I'm not going to get into here, the whole stirrups-and-speculum thing with a doctor all up in my business was triggering for me, and I preferred to skip the whole affair rather than go through stirrups/swab/cry-in-the-bathroom-on-my-way-out routine.

Let me tell you, though, if you wait long enough, relatively minor and easy-to-cure conditions can end up turning into cervical cancer, and that once yearly swab can turn into impressive numbers of medical professionals being all up in your business. Hell, I spent a couple of afternoons with my cervix being broadcast on a big screen TV in a surgical theatre to an audience of several people. "This must be what shooting porn gets to be like after a while," I thought, "only without all the fun parts."

Compared to that, the Pap smear is NOTHING. It's well worth the minor amount of fuss to find pre-cancerous conditions with relatively minor treatments, because leaving it go too long can have you end up on the wrong end of the cancer spectrum, which is why I'm now out both a cervix and one uterus due to cervical cancer.

Oh, and lest you think that there's a bright side to hysterectomies, like not getting your period anymore, let me enlighten you. You know how people who have a body part amputated sometimes experience Phantom Limb Syndrome? Well, my uterus is my phantom limb. I still get menstrual cramps about every other month from a uterus that doesn't even exist anymore, which is, yes, the stupidest thing any of us have ever heard. Also, it's a bit of a kick to the psyche.

So, I want everyone and the people they love who are in the possession of a cervix to hop up into their doctor's stirrups and get that thing swabbed on the regular, because one of the best and proven steps that someone can take to prevent a cancer is to have a Pap test. I had no symptoms of cervical cancer prior to diagnosis, so it's worth the appointment, even if you feel healthy. Some doctors suggest doing it every year, and some every few years depending on your age and medical history, but I say why not make it an annual party, like a birthday present to yourself to ensure you keep having more birthdays?

Cervical Cancer Information

• Pap test fact sheet, WomensHealth.gov
• Keeping Your Cervix Healthy, Canadian Women's Health Network
• Cervical Cancer, Mayo Clinic
• HPV and Cancer, a National Cancer Institute Factsheet

So, make an appointment and go get swabbed! It saved my life, and it could save yours. You're worth it.

Three Things Wrong With Today

1. I have a cold, and my entire body is weak as a noodle, and that noodle is also a terribly hurty and whiny noodle who needs to be tucked in and given tea and told she is very, very special, because her face looks really old when she's aching and sick, which is depressing, and she's pretty sure the world doesn't like her very much, and this is no time for bucking up, not when there's so much sad-making to be done.


2. Also, this introvert spent three days straight being an extrovert — seeing old friends, speaking at a conference, hanging out with toddlers who like to jump up and down loudly on giant bubble wrap — and, WOW, I am some hothouse flower of an introvert or something, because I am right at this moment working on my floorplans for my own remote, underground bunker. Anyone with communication skills more complex than my cats' set of meows and occasional pawing is not allowed.


3. I couldn't figure out what smelled like cat urine on this bus, but it seemed to be right near me, so I sniffed my way around the couple of seats I've commandeered — I moved from my purse to my coat to a diet Coke bottle, all which came up smelling pretty average for themselves — and then I decided to pull the paper cheese biscuit bag out of my garbage and check it out, even though that would be ridiculous, right? Because I had just bought that biscuit not 20 minutes before, and I would have noticed it, right? Well, apparently not, because the cheese biscuit bag wreaked of cat urine. Now all I can think about is how that cheese biscuit I ate was really a cheese and cat urine biscuit, and it's inside me right now. INSIDE ME.
   
   Would I like a little feline urine with my biscuit? Don't mind if I do. If it's not glowing in the dark, I'm not having it! Down with ammonia-poor diets!