This Body is Bullshit

Borrowed Strength

Let me tell you about the people around me for a second.

My aunt — one of my biggest caregivers through all of this — lost her daughter. A rare genetic disease. Young, long, devastating. And she still showed up for me. Still sent food and checked in and sat with me in waiting rooms. I don’t know how people do that. I genuinely don’t.

My stepsister and her husband lost their son. Same — rare genetic disease. And now her sister-in-law, only a few years younger than me, has been diagnosed with a rare cancer. The terrifying kind. The kind where there’s no protocol, just clinical trials and prayers and a lot of not knowing. My brother-in-law watching his sister go through that while still carrying his own grief. It’s too much for one family.

So when I think about breast cancer — my breast cancer — sometimes I think: kind of basic, honestly. There are protocols. Statistics. Support groups. A whole color. People know what to say. There are T-shirts.

Some days I feel guilty for surviving something the world has a roadmap for. Other days I feel lucky. Both are true. Neither cancels the other out.

But it still wrecked me. I want to be clear about that. Seven surgeries. Sepsis. Radiation. A recurrence nobody caught for two years. I feel like shit most of the time. So I’m not minimizing it — I’m just aware that I got to survive something with a plan attached, and not everyone gets that.

The reason I got through any of it is the people around me.

I have a support system that would genuinely embarrass you. Family and friends who show up — meals, money, phone calls, intervention brunches when I look like I’m circling the drain. They’ve been doing it since before cancer, back when I was a single mom trying to hold it together on fumes and cereal for dinner. I’ve been carried a long time. I don’t know how to pay that back and I’ve stopped pretending I ever will. I just try to live in a way that honors it.

Grace and I built something out of almost nothing, she and I. Tight budgets and homemade birthday magic and a lot of figuring it out as we went. I always felt guilty I couldn’t give her more. I still do sometimes. But she turned out extraordinary, and I can’t take all the credit — mostly because she did the work herself.

Master’s in forensic psychology. Her own apartment, her own job, her own car. Violence prevention and trauma recovery for underserved communities. I don’t support her financially and I am so goddamn proud of her for not needing me to.

It’s not a coincidence she chose that work. She lived some of it. Her dad was volatile and emotionally abusive and made her feel unsafe, and even though I tried for years to keep that relationship alive for her sake, she was the one who eventually decided she was done. She hasn’t seen or spoken to him in over ten years. I supported that completely. It was brave as hell.

She also, honestly, saved me. I left him when she was two. I was a shell of who I used to be — but she gave me something to fight for. She still does.

So some days, yeah. I feel lucky to have had breast cancer. Not because it was easy. But because I already knew what crawling through something felt like. I already knew how to borrow strength from people who loved me and use it to get up one more time.

This wasn’t my first round.

And even now — when I genuinely hate this body, this stitched-up scarred aching bullshit body — I still love her.

She’s still here.

So am I.