In the Brackets of Recovery
On Zeroes, Sandwiches, and Pathology Reports
I’m about 76% back to functioning (magical or otherwise) after my mastectomy, and my desire to write again has come back. Thank you for your well-wishes, and to those close by who were here to help me in my clumsy and sleepy state. I’m recovering at a faster clip than expected, so here’s to that. Speaking of recovery, I’m sharing some thoughts I had while I have been in it.
When I indulged my word-nerd with a brief search into the history of the word recovery, I found that in the 1500s, the word recovery had less to do with health and more to do with an act of reclaiming a possession that had been lost or taken away. That tracks with the ideas that are coming through in my own period of recovery.
Even though this is a little different from the way I usually write on here, I hope it encourages you to think about your own recoveries. The early spring is a good time to think about what might have been buried below ground for a while, dormant but still alive. Invisible, but still present. Something that you wish to emerge soon enough if you nurture it with your attention.
Recovering
1. The Clarity of Zero
I can’t tell if I should start trying to pull it together or open my hands and truly let it all go. Just to see what would happen. How bad would it get? Would something new rush into the new space I created by doing nothing, by making no plans to fill the empty space? Would there be clarity in the center of that zero?
I am a lot more curious about the empty space than I am about all the details that made life feel so crowded: the schedules and lists and should-do’s and guilt over not having or being enough for it all.
There’s no price to be paid in the zero.
Being in here doesn’t require effort or skill.
There’s no pretending in the zero.
You can’t disappoint in a place with no expectations.
There are moments when I know what it feels like in the space of the zero. In that sweet nothingness between thoughts and doing and being in a world that almost always feels too noisy and fast and ugly and sad.
But, I promise, I won’t stay there for too long. Because I love the warmth of being with family and friends. The way it feels to make things. To help out. To get riled up and sing along to favorite songs in the car. To go for a walk and witness a startling indigo bunting whose color I would call unnatural if it weren’t the other way around. If the unnatural world hadn’t gotten so grey that a color that bright distracts me from it.
I will stay just long enough to hear the call of some beautiful, good, and true thing that wants me to create it or until someone I love wants me to come out and make them a sandwich.
2. Speaking of Sandwiches
What if I became known for making delicious sandwiches? If kindreds came around and I fed them love between two slices of something springy and soft and wholesome?
What if all I needed to do to find out how to be helpful was to sit quietly and still enough in the peace and joy of how I truly feel my sweet spirit to be when I’m not trying so hard to be helpful?
What if it’s true that everything I needed to support myself and my loved ones found me right here in my kitchen where I have bread and a variety of ingredients I can combine to make them the type of sandwich they remember?
What if I then realized it was the scrambling to keep up in the life and system that was born of someone else’s imagination1 that kept me from living the life of my own?
It’s an interesting enough experiment, right? Can I afford to run it for a day? A week? A month? And if synchronicities and a clear creative impulse finds me, I’d know it was working and keep it going.
But then, I get a little tired, and I know there’s much to be worried about, but I can’t remember what specifically, so I reach for my phone to find the details. On Instagram, I find a picture of a friend’s kids smiling in the sun in soccer shorts and mouthguards. It was an exciting, warm day on the fields. She probably brought snacks for the team. I imagine she peeled orange slices and pried open the seal of a big bag of goldfish and felt the pressure shift a little as the trapped air inside released. She watched the children, satisfied and sweaty, and felt proud of them and maybe even a little of herself, which she deserved for all the hard work of getting everything and every body together to arrive on time this morning. Proud enough to take such a bright picture. My experiment in stillness is interrupted by the thought that they are really living, and I am trapped inside here with all this quiet and the thickly layered sandwiches of my imagination.
Luckily, I don’t have much choice right now while I recover about whether or not I should be peeling orange slices and fighting my kids to get out of bed and into uniforms early on Saturday mornings. To convince them that if they just tried harder, committed themselves more to it, they might grow to like it. To be fair, we did try for a little while, but it didn’t take.
And so I return to stillness because there isn’t much else to do right now or that my medicated mind is capable of, other than Instagram - which made me feel bad and ruined my experiment. Gratefully, the stillness says: It’s ok if that’s not for you. Maybe when you stop using other people’s lives as evidence in your prosecution of this fictional case of not enough, I bet you’ll get to smile in your own sun, too.
3. Reception
When I prayed for direction about what I am to make, or do, or be when it’s time again to work, I heard this: Put down your phone and pick up your pen. Because they changed the time while you slept. The sky is dark now when you wake up. Bow your head to the dark, early morning sky. We’ll tell you all you need to know while the sky lights above you. By the time you are done, the sky will turn to wispy pink, sometimes lavender, sometimes an electric sort of baby blue. When you look up, you’ll be able to see every crooked branch that juts and zags and reaches from their sure and sturdy trunks. You’ll want what you learned on the pages you wrote to be more like the trees - resolute and steadfast - than the changing sky, which feels more like a sense than a fact.
But then, if that were the case, what would give the branches a reason to reach?
4. Pathology - a branch of medicine that deals with the examination of tissue for diagnostic purposes.
The pathology report came back, and it said you’ve been working at keeping up with things that don’t make you feel all that alive for entirely too long. We were able to excise it for now, but it might return if you’re not careful, in this bracket of your recovery and beyond, to discover what is here that makes you come alive and make that what gets your attention and energy from now on. The only reason to worry is if you forget the plenty you were left holding.
5. Recovery List
Do not lift anything more than 2 pounds.
Do not raise your arms too high.
Do not get your heart rate up.
Do not drive or smoke or drink or scratch what itches.
When it hurts, stop what you’re doing and rest.
Let these limits be useful brackets that keep the unnecessary effort and noise away. Let them make even clearer what materials I have to create with. A whole bright and interesting and beautiful world right here within this clearing made by what’s not available. Here, where
so much is uncertain (it always was)
no faithful plans can be made
there are no lists I can make for when I feel anxious about time passing and my usefulness,
I see clearly what sustains me.
Let what I still love in this bracketed space be what I remember to hold fast to. When I once again have the amount of energy and time it requires to pretend:
that the measure of my worth and joy is equal to the number of income-producing tasks I accomplish, and
how pretty I look while doing them, and
that either will get easier with more effort, consistency, and commitment,
l hope I choose to give my returning energy instead to what gave me joy inside those brackets. [A truer list to reach for when I grow anxious or doubtful of my worth.]
Filling space in the company of kindreds with the sweetness of connection
Music
Trees and sky and plants and mysterious animal noises at night
The creative impulse
Prayer
Beautiful and soothing colors, patterns, and textures; the existence of beauty
Books and poems - also the existence of beauty
Walking and stretching
Silence
Breath
With love,
Tricia
p.s. Always happy to read and respond to your comments! What do you wish to recover? What essential items are on your list of things that are truly sustaining your spirit right now?
I credit adrienne maree brown for teaching me this idea, and I join her in thinking about it often. Here’s a quote from her on it in this interview with Krista Tippet: And what I realized is it is the work of radical imagination to do so, but also that we’re living inside of imaginations that other people told us were true and told us, this is how the world is.
And I always uplift my friend Terry Marshall. He was the first person to say this to me, that we’re in an imagination battle, which just blew my mind, and I think about it often; that we live in this abundant world, and we’ve been told it’s scarce.