Two years ago, right when I was diagnosed with cancer, several Doctors suggested I read Gabor Mate’s book, When the Body Says No. I wrote about the book then, about how the book made me feel like it was either my fault or my parent’s fault that I had cancer. At the time, I couldn’t hear its message because the lines it drew were too straight, too direct. They painted my inability to cope with stress as the reason for the Big C, and my childhood as the reason I couldn’t cope with stress.
In my blame seeking state, neither were acceptable answers. And, I couldn't see anything but blame. Understanding without blame, without judgement was a concept my head might have been able to understand but was a foreign language to my heart.
But now I’m finally open to hearing the message of this book – the message that we live in our bodies, and these bodies of ours are driven by our emotions. How we see the world relates directly to how we were raised in the world.
As the child of imperfect parents, as an imperfect mother and an imperfect wife, I have always rejected the notion that we can or should escape our accountabilities by blaming our upbringing. But that’s been my longstanding misunderstanding, for you see, you don’t have to be a blamer to try and understand yourself, and understanding yourself starts at the beginning. And, understanding doesn't automatically make you an unaccountable victim of circumstance, with no part in the play.
If I’m honest, I've struggled with myself since my mother died. And, railed against myself for being so weak. Even writing that down makes me feel…insufficient. Everyone’s mother dies. Why should I be so special, so dramatic about the natural order of the world?
Only now am I beginning to understand that it was because of the pedestal that I as on from the time I was a child, the one my mother loved to see me on, the one I clung to at all costs, that blocked my ability to listen to my body, to listen to me.
My pedestal of being the ‘good’ daughter, kind, hardworking, successful, helpful to the extreme, made even more necessary to compensate for being the ‘fat’ daughter… It was what I thought defined me. And, whenever I would feel myself slipping off, I would clamber back up. Brush off the dust and bruises, ignore the aches and pains – the migraines, the rashes, the asthma attacks, the hives - all of these were just my body betraying my need to be my best and most idealized version of myself.
My pedestal cracked to the core when my mother died. Not only because she was the eyes through which I saw myself, but because my pedestal was built on a tripod – of my mother and father’s love and my husband’s undying commitment. That was my base – I had my girls, my friends, I had my work – but their perception of me was my core. Without my mother, made worse by my feeling that I had let her down in her last days, the pedestal started swaying.
Some time and spackle later, I thought that I was finding my way back. Only to lose the next leg of the tripod – when my husband became ill, and his commitment to me wavered, my world spun. And, I couldn’t understand why – I shielded myself in anger, I found enemies (some just, some unjust) to fight and I dragged myself forward. Still unrelenting – still clenching my jaw and ignoring my body whining and moaning at me – I pushed through and tried to clamber back up on my tarnished and swaying pedestal.
Is it a surprise then that I spent that year, with a growing sore on my tongue, ignoring it…wincing when I brushed my teeth but not googling what it could be? Not saying a word to my Doctor? What could have been a simple nothing the previous year turned into surgery and radiation treatments and lifelong (albeit mild) effects.
The Big C and recovery from treatment sent the pedestal rocking so hard that I finally had to get off. And, it’s taken me a couple of years and lots of help to understand, finally laying BLAME aside, that the effort of understanding the WHY, understanding what makes up this pedestal I clung to, is probably the most valuable thing I’ve ever done for myself.
The pedestal has no place in my 2.0 Version of myself. So even though I often want to clamber back up, and sometimes pop up there without even thinking, I am trying (and sometimes succeeding!) at spending more time listening to the voice I'm so used to ignoring and testing my limits with kindness instead of a stubbornly clenched jaw.
PS. Dear select reader - I went a wee bit off topic on this post, it was supposed to be mostly about stress... but blame and understanding your stress is at the bottom of it all and that's where I went. But for anyone who hasn't watched Dr. Brene Brown on blame, the link is below. I love her and she makes me think... often. And, I've also linked Dr. Gabor Mate's book, which is insightful. And scary.