Content notification: cancer, chronic illness
So, it’s been a smidge. I thought maybe that was just because my hip was playing up – which it was – giving me a lot of grief in terms of pain and limiting my mobility.
Yeah. Turns out it’s a bit more serious than that, and I am riddled with cancer, which is not my favourite news. So the last couple of weeks have been A Lot, just in terms of getting a diagnosis and assessing where everything is at and being in hospital for a bit and starting treatment and on and on and on, right. The good news at present is that the hip pain is settling and my mobility is increasing, which, after not being able to move freely or without a lot of pain since just about Easter, feels miraculous enough for now. I’m spending a couple of weeks deliberately just letting myself be in bed as much as I like, and then will start emerging to figure out what some sort of ‘new normal’ might look like.
In some ways, it’s a blessing: I have access to at least some financial supports that mean I can take a pretty significant time away from work, and if you’ve been here any length of time at all you’ll know that there is a certain luxury to being able to figure out who I am outside the constraints of a 9 – 5 that even the cancer side of things can’t detract from. It’s intimidating as hell, as I’m sure it would be even if I’d just quit my day job to do my own thing full time, and suddenly I am responsible for figuring out what a routine might look like and what I want to prioritise during the hours my kids are at school in a very different way to what might have been expected otherwise, and now I’m fully responsible for my own mental health too in terms of not having daily colleagues or bosses or things like this…. Yeah. It’s a lot. But… it’s an opportunity-lot.
I have no idea how writing fits into this, except to say that – obviously – I want to do it. I want to write. Writing is one of the absolute top things I can do and have always been able to do for my mental health, and I want to create beautiful things during this time. But in terms of how well I’ll be or what pace I will go at or what I will work on… Gosh. Heck. Yeah. Literally everything, my friends, is up for grabs.
It does mean I’ll be popping by to blog more often, however, and hopefully even some longer-form posts around ideas that have been mulling in my head for a while now. I love blogging, and it’s nice to have space to prioritise it as just a Thing I Love To Do.
It feels weird, genuinely, to be staring down the barrel of a very serious diagnosis that, at present, has no optimistic outcome, and saying that I appreciate the space it’s giving me. There’s a certain degree of cognitive dissonance there, to be sure.
But also… I’ve wanted to know who I am without a 9 – 5 for years now. I guess this is the time the universe is finally ready for me to find out.
Would be a shame to squander that, regardless of what else may or may not happen.
xx