Emerging, and mortality

On 10th December 2024 everything stopped - I was diagnosed with breast cancer aged 44.

Here we are, and at the time of writing, I'm 2/3 of the way through chemo (to shrink the cancer before surgery) and getting appointments in place for the next phase. I've moved the medical stuff and my experience of treatment to other posts, so this one focuses on mortality and emerging into writing again.

I hibernated during January to April and haven't been much in contact with people, as I figured out what chemo was going to be like and how to keep myself going, both physical and mental health wise. I've felt a strong need to be inward and exist only in small ways. It's only recently I've felt able to think about writing, only recently I told more people and even updated LinkedIn! and only today I got my website organised (moved providers, merged old blogs to here) and actually typed anything. It's only in the last few weeks that, along with the spring flowers in this part of the world, and as I near the end of the first treatment phase, that I have slowly begun to feel I can start to emerge, and do more things than survive.

Cruelly, I had just taken voluntary redundancy in early October 2024, from a 5-year work role. I had just started upon a slow and painful process of figuring out (again) who I wanted to be professionally and what I was going to do with my life. Only to be diagnosed just two months later, and find out that I wasn't to be allowed to do that quite yet.

I have instead been forced into a period of reckoning that has added mortality and the meaning of life to the task of figuring out my professional contribution to the world. And to supporting my family, which had already been weighing heavily. The job stuff became secondary all of a sudden. I'm exempted from job seeking for (probably) a year, and thankfully supported by the UK's welfare system, since I was not in work at the time of diagnosis. I know those professional parts of my life are still needing to be dealt with around the corner, meaning my life has fundamentally paused in all ways for a full reevaluation. And the financial hit is meaningful. We're planning to sell the house and downsize once I'm healthy enough.

A friend asked me recently how I have dealt with the mortal threat. It was a good question. I think I've come on a journey with it. It reinforced, quite dramatically, something I wrote in my farewell message to my previous job:

I want to devote myself to my own life’s work – not someone else’s.

One of the main reasons I took voluntary redundancy from that job was that we were given an explicit choice to either "believe in" and adhere fully to the personal life's work and vision of the founder/CEO, or leave. I did not want someone else's mission and vision to take up any more of my precious time, and decided the financial cost of leaving was worth the gamble, for the meaning-of-life win I hoped to gain.

Apparently, life hadn't finished turning me on a sixpence, so now I have the meaning-of-life reckoning to do in spades. After I got over the first few tearful weeks of wondering if the cancer had spread too far to be treated, I found out it was likely to be able to be cured, so I could have a reasonable hope of living more than a few years. That phase of waiting for those early scan results was awful, but it did give me a helpful clarity about my death.

Previously I'd assumed I'd be cremated and scattered somewhere. As an atheist, I hadn't thought much beyond that. The imminent mortal threat, however, produced a surprisingly clear and instant refocus: that I'd like to be buried in a biodegradable coffin in a natural woodland (probably somewhere like this or this) and gradually re-merge with the land and contribute to growing trees, returning to the cycle of life.

I did a yoga video on Youtube with Adriene early in my chemo where she gave the mantra "I am connected to all things with love and kindness". Tears sprang up, and I realised that would do me for an afterlife, and this phrase (or just its first clause) was even something I could imagine putting on my memorial on 'my' tree in the burial woodland. Having those things become clear for me was helpful, as it sort of provided me with a very solid sense of spirituality that I hadn't pondered for a long time. It also enabled me to draw a relatively comfortable line under the mortality stuff and get on with attempting to live.

So, there are a few things I hope for. I hope I live long enough to get my children further into adulthood, to give them an easier transition into the rest of their lives without me. It's not that I consider myself indispensable to them, but we're all quite intimately entwined with each other, they are still young, and I want to be around a bit longer for them. I got them successfully to the ages of 15 and 19, but I hope for more for their sake, and for my sake that I get to see more of them, because they are great.

I also hope I live long enough to get enough meaningful time with my husband, that is not characterised by survival mode. We have been together for almost exactly ten years now, seemingly always lurching from one challenge to another. We have spent far too much of these ten years waiting for the time after the challenge, only for another one to pop up. I want us to get to experience at least some of the privacy and coupledom phase of relationships, that life has so far cheated us out of. He's great, and we deserve it.

Finally, of course, I hope I get enough time to do something that can be called "my life's work" that is just for my own sake. And ideally, leave something in this world apart from my PhD and my children, that others can benefit from. It might be a novel or two, or some music. I'd also like to find a way to scrape a living that doesn't make me feel like I'm selling my soul for someone else's project.

The first step of this has been to try to start writing again. I stopped writing for many years. I moved my website away from WordPress as part of leaving my old workplace as thoroughly as I could, and to signal my misalignment with that project. So, it's currently hosted on Ghost.

I moved my old blog posts here as well, so anybody reading back can now see where I stopped in 2015 (and, a lot of my naïveté and youth is on show in those old posts!). I mostly stopped blogging because I was involved in family court proceedings where some bits of my writing were used, and it totally dried up my desire to blog publicly. I tried to restart blogging in 2020, without success, mainly because I was too deeply invested in my job in the years 2020-25. Hopefully this is another 'new' 'new start for me and writing, which I've always considered a fundamental part of who I am.