Accepting My Feelings

At dinner earlier this week, I was talking to my partner, struggling to express the confused turmoil of emotion which had been roiling inside me all day, and he was listening carefully and lovingly, reflecting back to me the reality that I am going to feel whatever I feel, and that's going to be the way of it, and if friends or family have trouble with my being less of a rock of support for them, well, so be it.

My sponsor called shortly after the end of that conversation, and I was telling her some of the ideas which had been crashing through my brain that day, and she said bluntly, "You're not accepting your feelings."

It was as though a load had been lifted from my shoulders the instant after she'd said it - I knew it was true, and that this is what my partner had been trying to tell me, although more gently, not so directly. My sponsor and I have been through enough together, that she knows she can slap whatever it is down on the table between us, and I might startle a bit at the impact, but I will be able to hear it, recognise it, appreciate it.

All day that day I had been fighting my feelings, and it made my life unmanageable. I was fighting against the grief and sorrow of the cancer diagnosis, the fear and the sense of loss. My partner and I had barely 3 months together before we found out I have cancer - it seems agonisingly unfair to have met the love of my life and 3 months later be diagnosed with cancer.

Because like it or not, cancer changes everything. Suddenly our lives are filled with doctor's visits, phone calls from doctor's offices booking tests to stage the tumour, and what seem like endless conversations about cancer, with friends, sponsees, my sponsor, family members, it goes on and on and on, and I feel like I am forgetting what it was like to live a life without people crying about me when they talk to me,  and conversations about the cancer.

This morning, I woke up feeling desolate, and that moved into anger - I stood in my kitchen and wept helplessly as a furious anger swept through me. I haven't cried much since being diagnosed because I don't want to cry. I will allow myself a few tears here and there, but I haven't really cried, not the kind of abandoned sobbing I did when my friend died last May. I'm beginning to realise that I may need to allow myself that kind of weeping because I am grieving, I'm grieving the purity of the relationship with my partner before cancer intervened, I'm grieving my health, I'm grieving ordinary life.

Not much of help here today, I'm afraid. Bless you all for your support and kindness.