Grow up and love thy [past] self.

At the beginning of June, about a week after my surgery, a bunch of us gathered with Alex’s family to celebrate one special little human’s fifth birthday. Sitting around a fire table, Alex’s dad asked me how I was feeling about everything now that I’d had a little distance from the surgery. The only way I could explain how I was feeling was to separate the person sitting in front of them from the girl who walked into the hospital, sobbing and alone, just a few days prior. “I’m fine,” I said, as my voice began to break; “I just feel so bad for her.”

I remember all the details of surgery day so vividly. The way time moved like molasses that morning. The sound of Nathaniel Rateliff and Taylor Swift playing softly in the Subaru. The presence of my mom in the backseat as we drove. The feeling of Alex’s hug on the curb outside McCaig Tower. The way I watched from behind Alex’s left shoulder as my mom moved in circles on the curb, trying and failing to keep it together. The sound of all three of our sniffles. I remember walking into the hospital alone, grateful that my mask hid from the admissions clerk how hard I was really crying. I remember how ridiculous it seemed that there was a fire raging in the lobby’s fireplace in late spring. I remember the intensity of the heat it gave off. I remember the long hallway to the tower elevators, and how acutely aware I was of all the people I walked past going about their normal days, while the day ahead of me would change my life forever. I remember Seinfeld playing in the day surgery waiting room, the sound of the plastic bag they gave me to put all my belongings in, the sterility of the stiff cotton scrubs I changed into, and the feel of the itchy disposable blue booties I stretched overtop of my socks.

Jacs, pre-surgery. All I see in her eyes is tremendous fear and helplessness.

I remember being terrified when a lab technician came to take my blood. So anxious was I at this point that every new medical procedure, no matter how big or small, felt like the one where they’d tell me I was terminal. I remember the shitty porter I got, who made an effort to talk to every person in the hallway but me as I followed him to the day surgery unit. I remember thinking, I wish Mark was here to be my porter. I remember my plastic surgeon taking me into a dark room, without a word of explanation, to mark me up for surgery. I remember thinking, am I about to be assaulted? Why are we in here? and having to piece together what he was doing on my own. I remember my surgical oncologist sitting down on the chair beside me, and his warmth and kindness being my complete undoing. I remember the way he shuffled his chair closer to mine. The way he stretched out his arms to comfort me as I crumpled. How desperate I felt as I locked eyes with his, pleading for some sort of confirmation that I was going to make it out of this alive. The way he said “everything’s going to be okay” at that exact moment. I remember the anesthesiologist getting me a box of tissues and asking me if I needed more time to compose myself before she ran through the order of the day.

I remember the stiffness of the scrub nurse as she introduced herself. The way I followed her down the hall and into the operating room. I remember my brain telling my legs to stop, telling my lips to let the nurse know that I couldn’t do this today, that I wasn’t ready. I remember my legs continuing to move towards the operating room, knowing I had no other choice. I remember how cold and sterile the operating room felt, and that my feet felt like icicles that even warm blankets couldn’t thaw. I remember my surgeon introducing me to the others in the room, but having no mental capacity to take in their names or faces. I remember laying down on the operating table, a free flow of tears dripping down my temples as people prepared themselves around me. I remember how unnerved I felt that I could hear people shuffling around above my head, but that I couldn’t see what they were doing from where I was laying. I remember the anesthesiologist thanking me for putting my hair in braids that day as she hooked me up to the IV. I had read that a bun could change the way your head rested on the table, making it more difficult for the doctors to insert the breathing tube. I remember thinking, doesn’t everyone braid their hair? That’s what the book said to do. I remember how young the braids made me feel. I remember the nurse finally noticing my tears and rushing to get a tissue. I remember that as she wiped them away, her rigidity softened, and she told me that everyone was there to take good care of me. I remember my plastic surgeon announcing the checkpoint—where everyone ensures they’re on the same page, performing the right operation on the right body. I remember my surgical oncologist walking into the room from the scrub station with hands held up in the air, the way they do on TV, and saying, “Okay everyone, I’d like to start on the left side before moving over to the affected side.” I remember things going dark at just that moment.

Post-surgery Jacs. All I see is relief in her eyes that she’s able to send Alex proof of life.

Something happened that day that changed the way I viewed myself, the way I processed being diagnosed with cancer at so young an age. It was as if I split in two during sedation: pre-surgery Jacs, who had never been so sad or scared in her whole life, and post-surgery Jacs, who was just so thankful and relieved to still be alive when she woke up that she forgot about all the trauma she’d just endured. Riding the many waves of active treatment since then, I’ve persisted in these separate bodies. Present Jacs takes over for each past Jacs who has walked into another doctor’s office or hospital room to be poked and prodded at, exposed to too many male doctors and residents and medical students, cut open and amputated and only barely stitched back together, pumped full of poison and hormones and sleeping pills and contrast dyes, scanned and sent home to sit by the phone, waiting for the next set of results, the next referral, the next appointment, the next chapter of uncertainty. Present Jacs can numb herself from what’s happened by focusing on what’s next. But past Jacs? Well, she’s 274 little traumas. Each with its own pain. Each with its own grief.

The truth is that no matter how many people tell me how brave they think I am, or how strong they think I am, when I try to collect those past versions of myself, to reconcile all that I’ve been through with where I am now, I only feel one thing: completely and irrevocably heartbroken. I am not brave. I am not strong. I am a shell of a human being who, against my will, was backed into the scariest corner that any of us will ever face. Trying to pull all my selves back together and repair what’s been broken feels like an even bigger feat than fighting cancer does. It just feels so much easier to stay fractured, to show compassion and empathy for that terrified pre-surgery Jacs while I pretend that everything is relatively okay on this day. To show this self compassion, to acknowledge how sad I feel for this Jacs and all she’s been through, feels impossible.

But in this fractured space, I feel stagnant. Like I exist under water while the rest of the world keeps on living on the surface. Like I’m in a weird womb of sorts, where I can hear the muffled sounds of life, and see the blurred colours and shapes moving on the other side of the membrane, but I’m cocooned, not yet able, or not yet willing, to break through it. I spent the better part of this morning sitting in my bed staring out the window, beating myself up for not getting up to be productive, to do something—anything—that might bring me back to myself. I told Alexander that I felt so lost, so listless, like I didn’t know where I fit anymore and I didn’t know how to put one foot in front of the other, let alone which foot to start with. He reminded me of the concept of kintsukuroi—the Japanese art of repairing broken things with glue painted gold.

Instead of trying to return something to its original state, we celebrate its brokenness because it’s a part of its history. So that’s the lesson, isn’t it? As I near the end of active treatment, and have fewer and fewer next steps to distract myself with, I’m now left to look at all the broken pieces, all the past versions of myself that I’ve had to embody this past year, and try to glue them together into one functioning, breathing, living human being. But there is no restoring what once was. There is no erasure of this past year. No denying that my body created something that had to be cut out and covered over and poisoned and burned and hopefully held at bay for the next several years by drugs that make my body feel like that of a senior citizen. But there is repair. The opportunity to be broken by this experience and yet simultaneously mended. A new whole whose cracks are celebrated instead of covered over. Breast cancer is written all over my body, so I’ll do my best to collect my selves, to pull them all together, with glue painted gold.