This Body is Bullshit

Still Running

I think people assume I’m on the other side of this by now. That I’ve healed up, moved on, turned the page. And yeah — I’m alive. I’m lucky in real ways and I know it. But lucky and okay are not the same thing, and I think I’ve let people confuse them for too long.

Here’s what nobody tells you about survivorship: it doesn’t end. The surgeries stop — eventually, maybe — but the medications keep going. The scans keep coming. The side effects don’t get a finish line. My joints hurt. My energy is unpredictable. My bones are actually losing density from the drugs I have to take so I don’t die, which is a fun little irony. And there’s this number I carry around — ten to twenty years. That’s roughly when my cancer could come back, partly because I was walking around with it undetected for two years after my mastectomy. Nobody knows where those cells went. That’s just something I live with now.

So yeah. I wake up grateful. And also kind of pissed off. Both things are true and they coexist and I’ve stopped trying to logic my way out of that.

Life doesn’t pause for any of it either. There’s work — and I work hard, probably too hard. There are bills and texts and people who need things from me. I love my people. I love my life, genuinely. But some days the weight of all of it lands on a body that’s already asking me to lie down, and I just have to figure it out anyway.

I also shop when I’m anxious. Full disclosure. I know it’s not the move. I know I should be spending on experiences and fixing my house and saving for something. But when everything feels like too much, sometimes I just buy the thing and feel okay for twenty minutes. I’m working on it. Sort of.

And underneath all of it — the work, the body stuff, the just-keep-going — I’m still grieving. My mom died in 2021, right in the middle of everything. That same year I lost Gus, my dog, who had been with me through so much of the hard stuff. My grandmother was gone before that — she was my real anchor, and I’ve never stopped feeling that absence. I don’t talk about it a lot. I just carry it.

I think I’ve gotten too good at looking fine. I’ve been the strong one for so long that people stopped checking. And maybe that’s my fault. Maybe I made it look too easy. Maybe I got so good at showing up that everyone assumed showing up felt easy. It doesn’t. It just looks that way because I’ve had a lot of practice.

I’m tired.

Not dramatically tired. Just the real, honest, in-my-bones tired of someone who has been surviving on adrenaline and obligation for years and is finally, quietly, admitting it.

I want to feel good. Not inspirational-poster good — just physically, actually good in my body for a day. I want to spend money on a trip instead of a distraction. I want my house to feel like the home I keep meaning to make it. I want to stop living like I’m racing something, even though part of me still feels like I am.

I don’t need to be anyone’s beacon.

I just want to be Molly. Whatever that looks like now.