This Body is Bullshit

This weekend, my husband lost a friend.

A good man. Kind, private, strong. He fought cancer quietly — didn’t let many people in on how bad it had gotten until about a year ago. He lived across the country, which made it hard for his friends to show up the way they wanted to. They tried. But he kept most of it to himself anyway. That was his way.

He lost his wife to leukemia over a decade ago. And now their daughter — barely in her twenties — has lost both of her parents to cancer.

I keep coming back to that. A young woman, just starting her life, and both of her parents are gone. To the same disease. That’s the kind of grief that doesn’t have a roadmap. I don’t know how you carry that. I just hope she has people around her who show up and stay.

This group of guys — Matt and his closest friends — are all just past fifty now. This loss has shaken them in that particular way that starts happening at this age, when you realize health isn’t guaranteed and the people you love aren’t either. They’re barely through grieving one friend before another wave hits. One of their closest friends’ wives is in hospice right now. Also cancer. There’s no space between the losses anymore — just one rolling into the next.

And then today someone came by work. A guy I’ve gotten to know, someone I genuinely like, who’s been out on leave. He didn’t come for business. He came to say goodbye. He’s tired. He’s choosing hospice. He wanted to see everyone one last time while he still could.

It’s a lot. It’s just a lot.

But — and I always seem to find one — there are silver linings this week and I’m holding onto them hard.

My friend, my sweet spirit animal moon phase goddess, who was told she had a tumor in her ear — it’s Ménière’s disease. Which comes with vertigo and hearing loss and its own set of challenges, but it is not brain damage and it is not paralysis of half her face, which is what we were bracing for. That’s a win. A real one. Now I just need to keep her out of the sun so she stops getting carved up for skin cancer, because I fully intend to grow old and ridiculous with her.

And my stepsister’s sister-in-law — the one doing clinical trials for a rare and terrifying cancer — got some promising news. Her treatment seems to be working. That matters. That gives a lot of us a little air to breathe.

I don’t have anything profound to say about any of this. No clean takeaway. No lesson I’ve neatly extracted.

Just the overwhelming urge to hug my people and not let go.

Cancer fucking sucks. I hate it.

I’m Not In Her Walls

We had just gotten back from our happy place — a long weekend with some of our favorite people, the kind that sends you home actually recharged for once. I was pulling into the driveway, still in that good mood, and I saw my neighbor across the street. We’ve always been friendly. Casual. She helped us out a lot after my mastectomy — walked Gus, my 170-pound lovebug of a mastiff, when I couldn’t. She was there when I was in the hospital and Matt was juggling everything alone. We’d had drinks on her patio, laughed together, been good neighbors to each other. So I rolled down my window and said hey, happy Memorial Day.

She stared at me like I had five heads.

I chalked it up to her being… her. She’s always been a little different. Quirky. A lot of childhood trauma, some emotional stuff. Odd, but in a harmless way — or so I thought. I gave her space. She ignored me, I let her. Fine.

Then things got weird.

We started hearing her screaming inside the house. Not arguing — screaming. At her husband, at nothing, we couldn’t always tell. Doors slamming. Things crashing. Her back storm door ended up on the curb one day, just broken and discarded. She started blasting music in the backyard loud enough to bother the neighbors next to her. She yelled and swore at people walking past with their dogs. She cornered new neighbors demanding to know what the cocksucker neighbors were saying about her. Apparently she’s been telling the whole block that’s what we are. Charming.

Then one morning I went out for the garbage cans and she came over like nothing had happened. I thought maybe she was coming out of it. She asked if I’d been having trouble with my phone or internet. I said no. Then she told me she was on her third phone — all bugged. That Charlie had wires all over the house and was trying to make her crazy. And then she told me that my voice had been tormenting her through her speakers for months.

My voice. Through her speakers. For months.

She believes I’m living in her walls somehow, using AI to harass her.

I kept a straight face. Barely. I got inside and called our neighbor Teri immediately. Turns out she’d gotten a version of the same conversation — voices in the house — plus an accusation that Teri, who works for NASA, had been moving satellites to mess with their electricity. Teri said she actually shut the power off in her house for two hours trying to locate the source.

It would be funny if it wasn’t so sad. But it’s both, honestly.

There’s a part of me that feels genuine compassion — she’s clearly in crisis and she needs help. And there’s a part of me that’s just creeped out and a little annoyed, and I think both of those are allowed.

Because now she sits outside every night in a chair facing our house. Just sits there. No book, no phone. Staring. A few times during dinner she’s come into the parkway with her hands on her hips, just watching us through the windows. My dad was over once and we kept having to tell him to stop looking back at her because it felt like we were one eye-contact away from a suburban standoff.

At a friend’s urging, Matt and I went to the police station — not to get her in trouble, just to get something on record. The officer was kind. Told us this was the fourth time something had been reported related to her. The good news is our town now has a social worker on staff and she’s been referred.

I hope she gets help. I genuinely do. But I also need to feel safe in my own home, and right now I don’t entirely. I’m tired of looking over my shoulder. I’m tired of trying to hold compassion and self-protection at the same time like they don’t constantly contradict each other.

This isn’t quirky neighbor stuff anymore. It’s unsettling. And it’s exhausting.

And for the record: I’m not in her walls.

A love letter to sleep, guilt, and getting through the damn day

Some mornings it takes dynamite to get me out of bed.

Not drama — just the slow, heavy, body-aching kind of dread where you stare at the ceiling and try to negotiate with time. Five more minutes. Ten. Just enough for the aches to settle or the weight to lift. They don’t. Eventually I peel myself up and start moving, but it feels like operating a body that isn’t quite mine. Stiff, sore, bloated, tired, and — I might as well say it — depressed.

I don’t love saying that word. But it’s probably accurate.

Because the thought of going to work, putting the face on, managing emotions, solving problems, navigating people all day — it’s just a lot. Some mornings it’s genuinely too much and I do it anyway.

Here’s the complicated part: I love my job. I waited a long time for this position. I’m good at it. I love the employees, love being the person they trust, love being able to actually help someone when they need it. But the past year changed something.

Before the last surgeries, before the fatigue got this bad, I was doing everything. Fifty-plus hours a week, available after hours, weekends, always on. And my review said I was meeting expectations. Just meeting them. I gave more than I had and apparently that was average.

So now I work forty hours. I show up. I do the job well. I’m still running between buildings, still showing up for my people. And I still carry this low-grade shame about it, this quiet voice that says it’s not enough — even though “enough” has always been a moving target and I’ve never actually hit it no matter how much I gave.

I tell myself I’ll walk three miles after work. Get back to Pilates. Move the body, feel better, all of that. And then I get home and I’m just done. Completely done. And I’m stuck in the same loop every night — do I exercise or do I sleep, because I genuinely cannot do both and I need both and I don’t know which one I’m failing at more.

I want to feel good. I want to get up in the morning without it being a whole thing. I want to move through my day without dragging myself through it like something I have to survive.

But that’s not where I am right now.

Right now I’m just getting through it. Mornings feel like marathons. The days are long and then I’m home and then I do it again. And somewhere in there I’m supposed to be healing, exercising, sleeping enough, eating well, managing my stress, staying positive —

And some days I really want to tell all of that to go to hell.

But I get up anyway.

Home

Matt met me when my life was already fully unhinged. Single mom, unprocessed trauma, chaos as a default setting, baggage I hadn’t even inventoried yet. He didn’t flinch. Didn’t try to fix me or make me easier to love. He just stepped in and stood there — quietly, patiently, without needing to be the hero of anything.

He still does.

He does the laundry. Takes care of the yard. Vacuums without being asked. Does more than his share and doesn’t need a trophy for it. That kind of consistency is its own love language — not the grand gesture kind, just the steady everyday kind that quietly makes everything feel safer.

He’s more emotional than I am, which I did not see coming and did not think I needed. But he balances me. He doesn’t always say things out loud — words aren’t really his thing — but just by being who he is, he’s helped me slowly unlearn the habit of performing fine when I’m clearly not. He makes me laugh constantly. He tells dad jokes I pretend to groan at. He is, annoyingly, unfairly good-looking. I now know more about the Grateful Dead than I ever planned to. I’ve watched golf. That’s love.

He goes to bed early, wakes up early, and has somehow become a person who doesn’t need much — good coffee, a dog nearby, and me ideally not spiraling over something minor. He’s calm when I’m spinning. He shows up for the hard parts even when I don’t know how to let him in.

Here’s the part I don’t say out loud enough though.

Everything I’ve been through — cancer, sepsis, seven surgeries, scars, chronic pain, exhaustion that doesn’t really lift — it’s changed me. And it’s changed us. Especially in the quiet ways. The intimate ways. I miss how easy it used to feel. I miss spontaneity. I miss feeling confident in my own body without having to talk myself into it.

I don’t pull away from him. I want to be close. But I worry. I worry he doesn’t see me the same way. That he sees the fatigue and the pain and all the ways this body isn’t what it used to be. That maybe he misses the old me too, even if he’d never say it.

He has never once made me feel broken. But I feel broken sometimes. And I hate that he’s had to carry so much while I figure out how to feel whole again.

I want to give him everything — the spark, the ease, the version of me that didn’t second-guess herself constantly. We’re working on it. Both of us.

I don’t know if I believe in fate. But I believe he showed up at exactly the right time. Someone steady. Someone soft. Someone who wasn’t going to run when things got hard — and things got very hard.

He is home.

He’s always been home.

I just hope he knows how much I see him — even on the days I forget to say it.

The New Molly

I hear it a lot: I miss the old Molly.

Well, I don’t. She was exhausted.

People say it like I’ve slipped away somewhere and they’re just waiting for me to bounce back with glittery party invites and an armful of Jell-O shots. But that version of me is gone. And if I’m being honest, I’m not sure she ever existed quite the way everyone remembers her anyway.

Yeah, she was fun. Loud. The ringleader of whatever chaos was unfolding. She threw the parties and rallied the group and made everyone cry-laugh. But she was also quietly carrying a hell of a lot. Always holding it together. Always smiling. Always on. Nobody really saw the work that took.

I’ve been through some shit. Not just the cancer — though that’s part of it. Before that it was loss, single parenting, bankruptcy, burnout, exhaustion so deep it doesn’t have a bottom. Life didn’t knock me down so much as chip away at me, slowly, for years. And I’m still here — just not the same.

These days I like quiet. I like my dogs and my husband and not much of an agenda. I’m a brunch person now. A 3 p.m. cocktail kind of situation. I still love a good dinner out — great food, great conversation, a glass of wine — but then I want to go home and put on sweatpants. I like knowing where the snacks are and who’s going to fall asleep on me.

I don’t drink much anymore either. Partly health, mostly because it takes so much to feel anything that it’s just not worth it. Like — am I having a good time or just poisoning myself slowly? That math stopped working.

I’ll still get buzzed and dance somewhere unexpected — fun annoying drunk Molly makes guest appearances — but don’t pencil her in. She’s mostly retired.

When I do go out I’d rather it be somewhere with a real vibe. An experience. Even at someone’s house I love, there’s a part of my brain quietly calculating how long until I can be back on my couch. That probably sounds antisocial. I promise I’m not. I just value comfort differently now.

I miss throwing parties though. The silly theme ones — wear something ridiculous, eat too much dip, nobody goes home early. I want to bring those back. Actually, I am bringing them back. Watch for Muumuus and Margs. That’s all I’m saying.

And when I show up somewhere and I’m not being loud or holding court — I’m not sad. I’m not checked out. I’m sitting back watching my people laugh and be ridiculous and I am completely full. That’s my sweet spot now. Contentment. I don’t need to be the spotlight. I just want to be in the room.

So no. I’m not the old Molly.

She burned out. She evolved. She went home at 9 p.m. and felt great about it.

And honestly? I like this version better.

The Biggest Man in the Room

My dad grew up in a tiny town in central Illinois that nobody’s ever heard of. His dad was a state representative and a farmer. His mom was a teacher. He wrestled at Southern Illinois University, flew little planes, sold designer suits, and had a NASCAR champion as one of his best friends. He rode Harleys. He got into fights — the kind that ended badly for the other guy. He was funny and took up every inch of whatever room he walked into.

And then there’s the citizen’s arrest.

He handcuffed an attorney he felt had screwed him over, put him in his car in Carbondale, and drove him all the way to Chicago. Made the front page of the Sun-Times. Was on the evening news. My mom was mortified and tried to pretend it wasn’t happening. I wasn’t surprised at all — he told me he was going to do it weeks before. That was my dad. Absolutely certain he was right, completely unbothered by what anyone thought about it, and somehow charming enough that you couldn’t even be mad.

That’s the man I grew up idolizing.

He’s smaller now. Still has the mustache. Still has those enormous eyebrows. Still wants to make everyone laugh — that part hasn’t changed, and honestly I hope it never does. But he’s slipping. Slowly, quietly, in ways that are hard to watch and harder to talk about.

He knows something is off. He’ll tell you himself that he forgets things. But the minute you try to have a real conversation about how bad it’s getting, the walls go up. He deflects. Gets frustrated. Blames it on bad directions or construction or someone else’s mistake. I’ve learned to say “turned around” instead of “lost” — softer words for a proud man — but it doesn’t really help. He still shuts down. He still gets agitated. And I still drive home scared.

The hardest part is that he can’t understand what’s happening well enough to let us help him. And I can’t explain it in a way that sticks. I’ve tried logic. I’ve tried gentleness. I’ve tried humor. Nothing lands the way I need it to. The social worker told us to stop trying to explain — that we have to adjust because he can’t. I understand that. I’m just not ready to stop trying.

Kathy carries most of this. She lives with it every single day — the repetition, the confusion, the moments where he’s completely himself and the moments where he’s not. He’s obsessed with her, always has been, and while it’s genuinely sweet, it’s also exhausting for her in ways I can only partly imagine. I try to help. I take him for ice cream. I sit with him. I give her breaks when I can. But I don’t live inside it the way she does, and I know that.

He still carries dog treats in his pockets everywhere he goes. Every dog within a hundred feet finds him immediately — like they know. He still lights up when he sees me, every single time, like it’s been months even if I was just there last week. He’s still a die-hard Democrat who will absolutely lose his mind talking about Donald Trump if you give him an opening. Some things are stubborn in the best way.

But watching him fade — this man who once seemed like the biggest person in any room — is a specific kind of heartbreak I wasn’t prepared for. It’s not sudden. It’s slow. It’s a Tuesday where something’s a little more off than last Tuesday. It’s a conversation that circles back on itself. It’s the look on his face when he’s trying to find a word that used to come easy.

I just hope he always knows who I am.

That’s the thing I can’t say out loud to him — so I’m saying it here instead.

I left him when she was two years old.

Not because I suddenly found my strength. Because she deserved better.

There was a time when I didn’t recognize myself. I was hollowed out by a relationship that chipped away at me little by little. The damage went beyond words — it left marks no one could see. The kind that linger in your body long after you’ve left. The kind that make you flinch even when no one’s raising their voice.

I don’t talk about all of it. Some things I’ve kept quiet. But trust me when I say it was dark. And getting out was the bravest thing I’d ever done — until I had to rebuild myself with a toddler on my hip.

Even after I left, I kept trying. I wanted her to have a dad. I wanted some version of a family for her. So I gave him chances. We tried. She tried. But he kept doing the same damage — making her feel small, scared, like she wasn’t enough. And one day she just stopped. She cut ties. She chose herself.

It’s been over ten years since they’ve spoken. I supported that completely. She knew what she needed long before most adults figure it out.

She’s always been like that. Intuitive. Emotionally sharp. Fiercely self-protective, even when it cost her something.

People see her now — Grace, master’s degree in forensic psychology, working in trauma prevention, fully independent — and they say you must be so proud. And I am, god I am. But we didn’t get here on a straight path. It was jagged and messy and lonely. It was cereal for dinner and crying quietly in the bathroom so she wouldn’t hear. It was duct tape and dark humor holding everything together.

I was 23. Barely more than a kid myself. But I had her, and that gave me something to move toward. We didn’t have much, but we made it work. Road trips in shitty cars. Disney movies and popcorn. The kind of closeness that only comes from survival.

I always went overboard on her birthdays. Made sure the whole family showed up, spent more than I had, made it an event. I needed her to feel it — to know she was loved, that she came first, that she was never an afterthought. I don’t regret a single dollar of it.

She’s still healing. She had her heart broken recently by someone I never saw the magic in — I won’t pretend I was devastated when it ended — but watching it break her was brutal. She told me she never wants to date again. I get it. I hope she changes her mind someday, not because she needs someone, but because she deserves someone who actually sees her.

I carry guilt about what I couldn’t give her. The money. The calm. The stability of two parents who loved each other. But she got something else. She got fight. She got honesty. She got a love that spilled over even when I had nothing left. And somehow she turned all of that into power.

She doesn’t need me financially, even though I wish I could do more. She’s out there doing real work — helping people in under-resourced, traumatized communities break cycles most of us can’t even imagine living inside. I don’t know how she does it. I really don’t.

I still worry about her. That she’s carrying more than she lets on. That she inherited my anxiety along with my stubbornness. That she’s healing other people’s wounds while quietly tending to her own. But I’m in awe of her. She does out loud what I never learned how to do.

She saved me. Not with a grand gesture — just with her existence. She gave me the push I needed to leave. To try. To stop being someone’s shadow and start being her mother.

So no. I didn’t do any of this alone. Not cancer. Not motherhood. Not any of it.

She saved me first.

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.

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.

Seven

Let me back up.

After sepsis — or “after,” in the loosest sense of the word, because I don’t think my body ever actually fully came back from it — the expanders had to come out. My surgeon decided my body was rejecting them. So back into the OR. New expanders in. That lasted a few weeks before he decided to just move straight to implants.

Technically, fine. But nobody mentioned he was going to cut me from my chest all the way around to my back. I woke up with a scar I didn’t know I was getting. My body was already beat to hell from sepsis and healing at the speed of someone twice my age, and now this. The tightness. The pressure. The constant low-grade wrongness of it.

I went back to work. I functioned. I smiled. You know how this goes by now.

At some point I noticed something near my chest. Thought it was a cyst. It had been there a while — two years, maybe. I mentioned it. Got brushed off. Everyone seemed pretty unbothered by it. Eventually I saw a new doctor who took one look and said let’s take that off.

It wasn’t a cyst.

It was cancer.

I had already had a mastectomy. The cancer was supposed to be gone. I had already done the grief work of losing my breasts, survived reconstruction, survived sepsis, tried to find some version of normal — and the whole time, for two years, I was walking around with cancer still in my body. And nobody caught it.

I don’t even have words for that. I’ve tried.

Another surgery to remove it. Then radiation — thirty-one days in a row. Then the latissimus flap, where they take muscle and skin from your back to rebuild your chest. More expanders. More drains. Another infection. Another setback. Back in for more.

Seven surgeries. Total. For breast cancer alone. That’s not counting the hysterectomy, the oophorectomy, the gallbladder. My abdomen has been cut across twice. My body has been opened and closed so many times I’ve lost count of the drains and the stitches and the mornings waking up groggy in a hospital gown wondering what was new and broken this time.

I felt like a project nobody could finish.

And through all of it, I looked fine. That’s the thing people don’t understand about this. You look fine, you must be fine. You’re smiling, you must be okay. Meanwhile my body felt foreign and tight and heavy and nothing like mine, and I was just quietly living inside it trying not to make it weird for everyone else.

This is what survivorship actually looks like. Not pink ribbons. Not bell-ringing. Not the inspirational before-and-after. It’s missed diagnoses and infection and scar tissue and side effects you’ll be managing for years. It’s never getting to feel done. It’s the next thing, always the next thing, and somewhere along the way you just stop being surprised by it.

I’m still here though.

I haven’t quit.