5- Nothing I Expected

I always believed that, if someday they told me I had cancer, I'd give in. That I'd freeze with fear, that I'd throw in the towel, somehow. I don't know why I always thought that, but I was very afraid of that version of me.

And suddenly I find myself with the complete opposite. I'm afraid, obviously. But that fear doesn't live alone. It lives alongside another kind of strength I'm discovering. It's new territory, and I'm intrigued to see what else comes out of it.

If this is teaching me anything, it's that any expectation I might have had about myself was air. It wasn't based on anything real, or on anything I could have foreseen or imagined.

The same thing happened to me with the topic of community. I always thought community had to have a specific shape, one I didn't feel I fully had. And it turns out I do have it. It's more present than ever. I feel super held, super embraced by all these people, as I already said before.

The House That's Transforming

My house is transforming little by little in front of my eyes.

A Chilean friend, and a whole group of friends here in Holland, have put in hours to paint, to be present. The house has been transforming through pure love and laughter. Everything is still upside down, and the only thing I feel is enthusiasm: a lot of emotion for all this affection people are putting in. Though very exhausted too. The body keeps giving what it can, and I listen to it.

This friend, above all, has been one of the pillars of this transformation. He understood right away, said "let's go, forward," set his own work aside, and has been pouring enormous energy into this place. I hear them all day, laughing while they work nonstop: laying floors, putting up a wall, painting, moving things, cutting doors.

I can't even begin to explain everything we said we were going to do, to transform and clear out that energy that might have stayed behind from this house's past, from the time with my ex. I'm living in the middle of a bit of chaos right now, boxes and tools everywhere. But it's worth every minute, every square inch we paint.

At some point these past weeks he gave me a hug, and told me he'd been keeping me in his thoughts a lot. He told me he got into helping me because he saw in me that it would do me good, that I needed to focus on something like this.

He told me: "when you told me the whole list of things you wanted to do, I kept saying yes to everything, because I could see how determined you were, that nobody could have told you otherwise in that moment. And the first day we started working, I started bringing your expectations down, so you'd know we weren't going to get anywhere close to everything you wanted to do."

He got on my train, which was going at full speed with everything I wanted for the house, with the time I had, and now, looking at it from a small distance, with what I thought I needed during this time of adapting. He let me be. And when he saw the opportunity, he brought my expectations down little by little, without ever losing the warmth, the care, and also the clarity and the limits. That gave me clarity too. I didn't have to worry about what I'd already explored on other occasions: that thing about being too much, or asking for too much. He helped me absorb, transform, during this period. The house and the expectations adapted along with me. Without knowing it, he was helping me through that process.

He told me that all of this had also given him a lot of energy. And that he loved me a lot, that everything happening there was part of who we are, of what we invested and gave each other when we met, and that this whole group of people is here because they love me, and because they're with me, all the way.

Hearing that moved me enormously.

There's another friend, also very dear, who has been a pillar in a different way: the intensity with which he's been helping me, sometimes well into the night, moving things, decorating, cleaning, and above all, keeping me company a lot these weeks. He gave me enthusiasm, company, the energy to watch every change with courage, and a lot of affection, so I wouldn't be alone in the key moments. He kept offering as he saw, same as me, that he was enjoying helping me with this house process.

And then there's the rest of my friends, who kept coming to put in hours, or scattered days, however they could. And they still can, to this day.

Last weekend, in particular, was especially lovely. On Saturday I went for a walk with a friend, to talk and move a little, and that same afternoon a friend came over to help with the furniture and paint. On Sunday another friend joined in, and out of nowhere, without anyone asking, this last one's roommate also showed up to help paint for a couple of hours. That's how the whole house was those two days: people coming and going, everyone with their hands busy doing something, without me having to ask for anything.

It was so lovely to feel that the transformation of the house is also transforming me. It's helping me build this part I needed: my home, with my people, with the people who love me, each one putting in a drop of what they can, in their own way.

I want to honor these people, and everyone who put so much heart, so much energy, so much love into this. They're giving me so much strength.

What I'm learning here doesn't have that much to do with the color, or the shape. It has to do with doing it with this group of people: with them offering themselves like this, with them being so involved, understanding why I'm doing it. That's been magical: barely having to explain it at all.

There are people who tell me, straight out, that I'm crazy: how am I going to turn my house inside out right now, with an operation coming up, fresh off a cancer diagnosis. And I think that's exactly what gives me more strength to do it. Knowing I'm going to come back to a place full of this warmth, this heat, even if it's not finished, doesn't matter to me. It lets me know that I'm going into that operating room soon, and that when I come out, I'll have my place: a place where all these people who've been helping me can come in, where I can laugh with them, where I can heal with them.

Healing, at the end of the day, hurts. Nobody said it was going to be a walk in the park. It hurts to let go of the emotions that show up, like anger, or sadness.

But as I write this, I notice I'm putting the emphasis on the phrase "let go," which points to something that clearly passes. An ending. A release.

And there's something different about how I'm healing this time. I want to take care of myself. I've never been someone who wasn't healthy, quite the opposite, but this is different from anything I could have imagined.

If I take anything away from this last year and a half, and from this illness, it's that healing, however messed up it may be, is still a natural process. And even though in many cases I want to run away, hide, like everyone does, being able to look at this straight on gives me space: space to not know, to give myself that margin of simply feeling it, nothing more. It is what it is, period. Without having to fix anything, without having to justify anything, without having to defend anything. And taking the real time to feel each thing, and to reflect, alone and with help. I don't think I've ever had this inner peace. But I'm having it now. I still don't quite know how to put it into words. I'm discovering it.

And it's not just the house that's being reordered these weeks. My work is too.

Saying Goodbye, Little by Little

Yesterday I had a session with a client I hadn't seen in four or five weeks. I knew it was going to be hard to tell her. She's a somatic therapist, she's been with me for a year, and I have a very particular closeness with her.

Before we started, I told her I had to tell her something: that my schedule might close because of the diagnosis, because of the operation they're going to do, and that I didn't know when it would open again. Her tears came right away. And so did mine.

She told me she knows she's very much about physical touch, that she felt held in the space we share, even though it's only online. And that not knowing what's going to happen to me, whether I'm going to be okay, hurt her.

We stayed there for a while, the two of us crying together. Then we started to joke around, and that's when we could make a shift: I was able to hold her in what she'd come to bring to the session.

The first thing I told her, when she started crying, was: "I knew it was going to be hard for me to tell you this." It was a kind of mutual recognition of what was there, of that feeling we both had. I told her that if she needed to talk to someone while I was away, I could give her some names. She said no, that she'd hold out however many weeks it took. She told me: "the thing is, now I worry about you."

It was so lovely, so warm, and it moved me deeply. I realized, right there, how hard it's also becoming for me to say goodbye to my clients. After being with them, some longer than others, I've grown very fond of each one. And I also have to let go of the worrying about them, and trust that they'll be okay, or that they'll be able to ask for the help they need if it comes to that.

This keeps repeating, in different forms, with every client I tell. Not everyone cries with me like she did. Some get practical right away, ask me about dates, offer me names of colleagues in case I need coverage. But in every goodbye there's something similar: that same recognition that the relationship mattered, even if each person shows it in their own way. In some cases I'm referring them. In others, I'm just explaining what's going to happen.

They've given me their full support, which is also so moving to see: that from that place where I'm the therapist, where they come to me for emotional support, they can step out of that role for a moment and tell me, wait, I want to support you. They've shown me how grateful they are, how much good my sessions, my presence, have done them. It's an enormous satisfaction to see where this path I started years ago is taking me.

I don't know if it's true, but I think I have a clarity in my sessions now that maybe I didn't have before. I notice that I hold my clients differently, maybe with more honesty, with less fear, with much more calm. Although really I'm assuming something here. This is what happens to me in the sessions, not necessarily what my clients feel. That's a question that stays open.

All these goodbyes accelerated suddenly a few days ago, with a phone call.

The Date

I got the date for the operation: September 28th. I want to keep writing at least this week, and I think next week too, before going into the operating room. After that I don't know how I'll be.

The news hit me hard. And the curious thing is I didn't fully feel it until minutes later, when I was already on the phone with a friend, coordinating who's coming first, who's coming after.

Suddenly I was in full production mode, sorting out logistics, as if getting the schedule in order could somehow put everything else in order too.

She was the one who brought me back down to earth. She said, almost in passing: "did you forget, or what, that you have cancer?" I stopped and thought about it. It's not that I'd forgotten. It's that these weeks I've been so busy, so full of energy doing all of this, receiving so much love, so much support, so much light, that in a way I've been floating in it. The light that came from everywhere, and the one that also came from inside me.

A friend from Ecuador wrote to me recently: "The body is wise. Symptoms are messengers of what we need." She told me she saw in me a woman who'd been through a lot, and that whatever it was, it's already passed.

I don't know if this is proven a hundred percent, medically. But my work with Gabor Maté's ideas, along with Bessel van der Kolk's, is based exactly on this concept: that the body keeps the score, and that sometimes illnesses show up because of emotions and pain that weren't worked through. I don't want to go on about this right now, but I do want to say that what my friend reflected back to me made sense to me.

What I liked most about what she said was this: that I went through a lot of pain, that it was a lot for me, and that my body is already healed the moment it pushes all of that out, in the form of cancer, of a tumor, something that can now be removed.

That, in a way, is already healing, it just needs help. That help is the surgery: it's going to take out the last of that pain, and even though it'll hurt for a while physically, especially at first, the hardest part will already be behind me.

Part of the preparation these past weeks was also figuring out how to write something that would have legal validity, a kind of will, handwritten, without having to spend money on something like that right now. I don't have anything too complicated to leave behind, but I know I need to leave it explained. Before, I had all of this tied up, legally settled, but the divorce brought so much upheaval that this part still hadn't gotten resolved. Suddenly now it becomes real, and necessary. I know it probably won't be needed. But it's part of preparing myself. I don't want to leave my loved ones, and especially my son, with the job of not knowing what to do with things, with all the bureaucratic paperwork that's part of this tangle we live in.

If I have to sum up these weeks, I'd say this: they've been intense, and strong. There was fear, there was grief, there was anger, there was acceptance, there was exhaustion, there was frustration, there was physical pain and another kind of pain. But above all, there was love, laughter, care. And that's the part that stays the most: all of this and more, that filled this house, and that I'm filling myself with.

Next week will be one day before the operation. I'm curious to find out what it will be like to be so close to what's imminent, what's unappealable.

Nothing about this was what I expected. Not the house full of people painting walls, not a client worrying about me instead of the other way around, not this exact date I now have written down somewhere. When all this started, I had no idea it would feel like this.

—

🎵 "Betún," by Anna Rossi, from the album "La casa."

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