Fragility

Today, I feel fragile.

It’s a combination of exercise in the heat, catching up on sleep, work demands and a family row. The last of these is what script tutors might call the inciting incident, in that my attention and energy have dissipated since it happened, like a soluble tablet hitting a glass of water, until everything is flavoured of that tablet.

One is supposed not to talk about these things, but it’s the not talking that normalises it. Silence does not benefit me. The original rupture happened two years ago, when I was still in active treatment, and was basically insulted by this person while battling radiation burns. Because of the relationship, I felt it was on me to keep the peace, to try and reconcile, but each attempt only provoked more jeremiads and contumely in return.

At the time it happened, I had switched to anastrozole as a long-term hormone blocker since my oestrogen levels were low. (They later came roaring back with a vengeance.) Anastrozole is an aromatase inhibitor, which basically means it mops up any stray oestrogen it might find hanging around in fat cells. Combined with the effects of the chemo, it was pretty grim at first. I had seemingly endless hot flashes and mood swings, and when that patronising insult landed, I went into complete meltdown. The rage I felt was all-encompassing, out of proportion to the behaviour that provoked it, but when one is attacked at their weakest, one snarls more in retaliation.

At the time I funnelled my anger into creativity. I wrote a poem called “Embarrassing R*** L******” (the insult, well one of them, was that I was an embarrassment to my family and particularly reflected badly on that person) which was a performance piece in which I iterated through every symptom of my disease and treatment and how they must have mortified this person; and a story called “Then God Put a Mark on Cain” which referred to an failed act of reconciliation where I knitted the person a scarf to try and make peace.

The former, I did not perform or attempt to publish because it was too personal, though funny, only reading it aloud to a room of fellow survivors last year. The latter I did submit, and almost got published in The Stinging Fly, with an encouraging note from editor Lisa McInerney. Thank you, Lisa, for your encouragement.

In the end, both these works were more about myself than about the aggressor. The first one was an acknowledgement to myself, that no, actually, cancer treatment is not a barrel of laughs, your body goes through quite an onslaught. Reading through everything in “Embarrassing R*** L******” made me realise what a journey I had undertaken. Whereas in “Then God Put a Mark on Cain” I talked about the estrangement, both mine and the biblical one, then extending it out to armistice, and also examining where my changed body corresponded with Cain’s mark. And ending with a philosophy inspired by both Yeats and Sassoon.

Sassoon was fiercely anti-war and mentally volatile, yet won a Military Cross slaughtering Germans. For my part, I am resilient in the face of serious illness, yet frangible when it comes to navigating people and family norms, not to mention work, exercise and writing. That’s the thing - I’m tough as old boots, but selectively so. I’m delicate and emotional and oversensitive - again, selectively so. How valiantly I fight, and how swiftly I can be disarmed.

I feel the physical impact of this further incitement of the quarrel as much as the mental one. I feel drained, depleted. My concentration is smashed. It presses old buttons that I thought were gathering dust at this stage. I know that it is a small thing in the grand scheme of things, it just confirms a permanent estrangement, but my body must absorb this blow, and find some way of metabolising it that does not harm me.

Exercise helps. Earlier in the day I’d run 5.5k in hot weather on an “easy run” and I was whacked. I lacked the energy to go into paroxysms of rage. I was better regulated this time around. There was also a sense of failure since I felt I had not managed to be “mature” in response. The fact that I had heavy duty poisons and hormones raging around my body at the time means that I can be more self-forgiving now.

I need to wrap this up and make it have something to do with writing. I feel the inner critic goading me again, look at you, blurting all your feelings out on the internet, no dignity, no discretion. But in truth my feelings are a part of my writing, and my writing is a part of my life and health practice, and the time when I owed anyone silence has arguably long passed. My physical reaction implies psychic injury. And look at the twinning of those words, insult and resilient. Did you know that both of these words have the same etymological root in the Latin salire, to jump? Insult - someone jumps in. Resilient - the ability to jump back. Maybe that shows that when we ask resilience of people, we should ask what it is they are being asked to be resilient against?

I may not jump back but I will move back, in my own time, to centre, and have enough wits about me to impersonate normality once more. I will write my way back, the way I have always done.

Fragile. Resilient.