acceptance >tolerance

Would you believe me if I said that surviving cancer has been harder than fighting cancer?

I wish I would have known, I wouldn’t have stopped to breathe.

 It’s getting closer to the one year anniversary of my 3rd cancer diagnosis for Leukemia and when I look back I don’t see progress, I see regression.  Yes, I said REGRESSION. A year ago I had almost completely recovered from an Allogeneic bone marrow transplant in half the expected time. My body had bounced back and was running between 2-10 miles literally every day (run streak IYKYK) and lifting more than my previous weight. I was even gearing up to go back to work, I got into a Master’s program at Purdue and I was ready to forget this whole “transplant thing” ever happened. I was a walking miracle, for a second…

Now a year later I am still working on my first push up, trying to get my body back to a place where it can move without pain and I just want to go on a walk without worrying that I am going to shit myself.

Some days I just sit here and think “What the hell happened?”. When I look back it’s all a blur, maybe that’s for the best, maybe it’s my coping mechanisms blurring things all together so I don’t have to remember the past and focus on the present.

Being physically debilitated and having to constantly manage pain after a few months started to take it’s toll. In the past I used physical activity as a way to connect with myself and when that was taken away from me it made me feel completely unplugged from who I was. I came down from the high of beating the odds and then my mental health started to fail me too. I felt like a zombie, and then depression started to set in. It was really hard to be thankful in the midst of this. Which made me even more angry and frustrated with myself. The voice inside me was terrorizing me more every day with the question “Karrah, why can’t you just be grateful that you’re alive?!”.

Then that led to more depression, more frustration, more anger and it turned into a cute little cycle that seemed like it just couldn’t end. I couldn’t even connect with my therapist. Sometimes we just stared at each other in silence. Not being able to connect with myself was more painful than my physical symptoms. On top of all of this I couldn’t even look at myself in the mirror because each day I was becoming more unrecognizable due to the weight gain caused by steroids and all the medications I was putting into my body. I was getting further away from the person I knew myself to be and I couldn’t stop it. I wanted the old me back, I didn’t want to learn how to love this new person.

In the end I didn’t have a choice I could’t just stand still and wait for what was familiar with to reappear. She was gone, but I didn’t want to come to terms with it.

I knew I needed time to be angry and grieve what I had lost but I had to allow myself to admit what was now gone. It’s scary to come to terms with loss, once you do you can’t hide behind the curtain of denial, the hope that it just might show up again someday. If I admitted it I would have to deal with it, but did I have the strength to do that? Again?

Giving myself permission to accept where I was at verses where I wanted to be was painful. It still is, I haven’t mastered this.

I needed to give myself true acceptance, not tolerance. To survive I had tolerated myself, I even made myself cringe

I finally had the revelation that if I was ever going too move forward I would have to openly accept the new diaper wearing, can’t do a push-up, needs help getting dressed me. I knew I would even have to try and go further and like this new me.

Acceptance, that action was difficult for me to understand how to implement. I tried so hard to accept who I was and where I was at but I kept failing. I couldn’t. I realized I was getting ahead of myself. I was trying to skip the ugly parts connected to grief that comes before true acceptance can be recognized called anger and depression, and even resentment towards myself.

In true honesty I tried to skip those feelings because I didn’t know how to let the people who loved me see those extreme parts of me. They had given so much to support and love me it was almost like I was ungrateful or that I was failing them if I allowed those feelings to become completely unhinged. Plus, what would I truly find inside myself if I let anger and depression about what I had lost actually take shape? Would I get trapped in these dark feelings or would I be able to move through them? Or maybe it was that I really didn’t want to accept this more limited version of myself. It was probably a little of both. I was at a stand still for several months, then I realized that I just didn’t trust myself.  I was scared to dig deeper into these darker places of myself that I kept tightly out of sight. I didn’t want to know what was there, but finally I realized two things. I really am not the same person I was, I have changed. I am stronger, maybe not physically but mentally, YES. This third diagnosis has made me more resilient. I can be trusted. I am not my feelings. They are simply that, feelings. Feelings can be strong indicators, they can provide direction and information about ourselves but they are not who we are. Just because I am experiencing anger does not make me an angry person. Just because I’m experiencing seasons of depression does not mean I am a depressed person. I am not the darkness that I am experiencing. I know how to find my way out of a dark situation, I know how to move through it. I’ve learned that it is more beneficial for me to invite these feelings instead of spending all my energy dodging them if I’m ever going to move forward.

 This past year has taught me that I can trust myself, even the unattractive parts, they don’t define but they are a part of me and I’m not scared of them. I am on the road to full acceptance of who I am and where I’m at, not just tolerating it.

Can we do better than just tolerating ourselves when we’re struggling? If we don’t like something we can change it, but we should be able to accept ourselves in the process, not wait until after we’ve achieved the proverbial “finish line”.

I have always withheld genuine acceptance of myself, it is what has motivated me to move from goal to goal and continue to strive to always achieve more. Once I achieved one thing I would suspend approval of myself until I accomplished the next goal. I always made sure there was something else to accomplish next. I never stopped to celebrate how far I came and I teased myself with the possibility of acceptance.

There are constant reminders about how toxic comparison is in regards to other people, but what about the toxicity that occurs when we’re comparing ourselves to what we used to be able to do, or what we used to look like? Competing with who we used to be instead of inviting the present version of who we are can be destructive at times, at least for me. Waiting for my former self to come back was preventing me from moving forward.

Sometimes we won’t be able to do the things we used to do, maybe we’re moving through something that might require a moment of compassion and grace from OURSELVES. I have to stop withholding that from myself because I think I don’t deserve it.. It would be easy to offer those feelings to anyone else but me in that situation.

Oh the irony! Why can’t I allow myself the same acceptance I give to others? I’m seeing now that I can’t only accept myself only during the times that I’m hitting goals and crushing milestones, those things aren’t always going to happen. If I want to embody unconditional love it has to start with accepting myself and trusting that where I am at is exactly where I need to be, ugly feelings included.