Running red lights.
How breast surgery helped me learn to hold the tension
In the spirit of Spring Clean season, I was organising my memory box which is brimming with birthday cards, letters, forms and the journals I have filled over the past 8 years of living in Australia.
Sometimes I play a game with myself of turning to a random page in a random journal to see what past me has to say to present me.
On Friday night, you would have found me snot nosed and tear stained over my dining room table.
It felt truly like I was speaking directly to me, to my current experience, my inner world. The very season I feel immersed in.
There was an intimacy between me and my body in 2022 that I have rarely shared with others. It was a long lesson in holding the tension, spanning almost 10 months, an ironic gestation, where I finally met myself. I had been oscillating between believing what was happening was a message of preparing for matresence someday, to falling victim to fear and that I was sick. There was a heartbeat in my left breast, which swelled with discomfort until it finally released its clear and white droplets onto my bralettes. Every cycle it was the same, the truth telling serum finding its way out. This anecdote is a reflection of the final month of gestation with this bodily message.
I am dancing between worlds again. Holding the tension is the mantra, ‘and so it is’. I remember lying in the back garden with my hands over my belly and chest. Breathing in the September sun, feeling the tickle of grass blades at the nape of my neck. There was a certainty in the symptoms. For the past 9 cycles, my left breast had felt tense as a build-up of a presence inside it ascended, then released. I had seen specialists, and there was a knowing there were two paths that may be taken.
I was sick, or I was not.
This was sinister, or it was not.
I would need treatment, or I would not.
But the decision was already made. God or Mother or Spirit already had a plan for me. And I would know it soon. There was no quickening or slowing down of time as it slithered across the sky each passing day. In the waiting, I found an anchor within my menstrual cycle that speared the soil. It was the ability to hold the tension. And for my cycle to hold me right back. I took control of what I could, chose a date for the surgery, for when I was ready, and asked for support from my partner.
I had been learning about ‘holding the tension’ in Red School’s Menstruality Leadership Program that same year. A feeling often linked to the Luteal Phase of the cycle, where our inner critic chirps loudly and our truth telling serum pours from our foaming mouths. There is an authority and a surrendering when holding the tension. It’s almost psychedelic, a journey into the underworld. Allowing peace to infiltrate the very bones of you as you navigate the shit and shines of everyday life. It requires deep trust, something even a few months before this sweet time I lay in the sun, that I still hadn’t grasped.
I had previously had a date for the surgery booked over Winter. A date before I was ready to know. The sheer overwhelm and anxiety of it had me cursing the slow to move driver in front of me as he casually curved to the right. Me, incorrectly judging timing and distance in a haze of impatience. The most expensive right turn I ever made. I felt the flash of white behind me, a rock heart sinking in my chest. I spent most of my afternoon shift in the office with tears down my cheeks. I should have gone home. But the rush in overwhelm cost me the energy of that whole day’s work. A split second not taken, to hold the tension of traffic.
People are constantly going across us, before us, cutting us up or under and over taking us. There’s people we feel are slowing us down. You know those daydream saunterers who you are basically breathing down the neck of to move aside so you can get on with your day as you awkwardly walk around them. Then there’s those pulling us by the hair at a pace we cannot maintain. It doesn’t always feel fair, but we all come to the same set of traffic lights at the end. The same red light illuminated. Take a moment to sit and observe.
Resist the attempt to move on someone else’s green light. Wait for yours, it will come.
Sometimes, it feels like it should be yours. And humility lays her cards down, flipping the deck to the red request to rest. What would it be to sit at your steering wheel and watch the shadows dance across your dashboard. To count the commuters and wonder where they’re going. How are they feeling today? To breathe back and sink a little deeper in your seat. To listen to radio chat and think about who invented crossroads.
Me and my cycle, we held the tension together as we went under. I remember my eyelids slowly growing heavy as the anaesthetic took me, watching the surgical light above me as I prayed to the angels to keep me safe. Then again for a fortnight more as we waited for green together.
Nothing to worry about, as felt. A dilated duct that was removed and hasn’t brought any further concerns.
There is a little scar where it was taken that I sometimes stroke in the shower. Remembering.
Your green light is coming. Lets enjoy red for a little while longer.
