This Body is Bullshit

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.

The Part Nobody Saw

December 2020. Diagnosed with breast cancer.

I didn’t fall apart. I made a plan.

By March 2021 I was having a double mastectomy — both breasts removed, expanders put in the same day. I thought that would be the worst of it. I thought that was the scary part.

It wasn’t.

The morning of surgery, Matt drove me to the hospital and dropped me off at the front door. That was the rule — COVID. No one allowed inside. I looked at him before I got out of the car and we both tried to be strong, and I could see it on his face. It broke his heart to leave me there. He didn’t say it. He didn’t have to. I know him. He cried on the way home — I’d bet everything on it. He would’ve been right next to me holding my hand if they’d let him. Instead he went home and waited and worried and held it all together from the outside while I went in and did it alone.

That’s a specific kind of alone.

About a month later I started feeling sick. Really sick. Convinced myself it was COVID, waited probably too long, and ended up at a local ER. That’s where they told me I had sepsis.

Sepsis was the scariest part of all of it.

My body was shutting down. My veins were collapsing. I remember lying in that hospital bed thinking this is actually it — I survived cancer and I’m going to die from something else. I didn’t tell anyone how bad it was until over a year later because I didn’t want to scare them. That’s what I do. I minimize. I keep the temperature down. But I was on death’s door, and I knew it, and I kept that completely to myself for eight days while I was, again, mostly alone in a hospital because of COVID.

That experience changed something in me that I don’t think ever fully changed back.

I left with a PICC line in my arm and had to keep doing antibiotics for days after discharge. And that was just the beginning. My plastic surgeon — let’s just say he disappeared when things stopped being textbook. When I became a complicated case, he became suddenly unavailable. His PA did a flush in the office that didn’t work. Another surgery. New expanders. More drains. More everything. That surgeon eventually cut me from my chest all the way around to my back, which I was not prepared for and took forever to heal from — my body doesn’t heal fast on a good day, and this was not a good day, or a good month, or honestly a good year.

Seven surgeries total before it was “done.” I put that in quotes because I’m not sure it’s ever actually done.

Through all of it, I kept saying I was fine. The world was already upside down. Everyone was stressed. I didn’t want to be a burden on top of a pandemic. So I smiled when I could and said the right things and people believed me, and I think part of me needed them to.

But nobody really saw it. Nobody saw me almost die. Nobody saw what was happening in those hospital rooms. And somewhere in there I think I just got used to carrying things quietly — like that was my job now. Like that was just who I was.

Sometimes I’m still not sure it isn’t.

The Weight of It

Today feels heavy. Not dramatic-heavy. Just the quiet kind — the slow ache that shows up when you’ve been holding it together for so long you’ve stopped noticing the weight.

My best friend just had a mastectomy. She’s in the beginning of it — everything raw and new and terrifying. She doesn’t want to take the medication. She doesn’t want the side effects. She doesn’t want to feel like shit all the time. And god, I get it. I sat with her while she cried and I felt that weird cocktail of heartbreak and… something else I’m still trying to name. Maybe grief. Maybe frustration. Maybe just the quiet hope that she finally — finally — gets it. Gets what it’s been like for me.

Because I’m not sure anyone ever really did.

And I never wanted anyone to have to understand. But sometimes I wish they could see the full picture. The surgeries. The complications. The fear I didn’t perform out loud. The years of just trying to feel okay in a body that hasn’t felt okay in a very long time.

Here’s the thing about me: I didn’t cry when I was diagnosed. I didn’t spiral. I didn’t fall apart. I just did the next thing. And the next thing after that. And honestly, I’m still doing that — checking boxes, holding pieces, waiting to exhale. I’m not sure I’ve actually processed any of it. I’m not sure I know how.

I’ve been surviving for years. But surviving isn’t the same as living, and I think I’ve known that for a while without saying it out loud.

I show up. I smile. I work. I love my people. But I don’t always feel like I’m in my body. I don’t usually feel good, actually — and that’s a weird thing to admit when everyone sees you as the fun one, the strong one, the one who cracks jokes instead of crying. I’d rather change the subject than sit in sympathy. I genuinely don’t know what to do with it. It makes me squirm.

So I’m not writing this for pity. I’m writing this because I don’t want to forget what this actually feels like — to have survived so much and still just want to feel well. To be allowed a bad day even when you look like you have it together. To want more than survival without having to justify that.

I don’t know if I’ll ever feel the way I want to. But I’m writing it down anyway.

Maybe someday I’ll be brave enough to let someone read it.