A Lump of Truth Just Under the Surface
I found a lump in my breast. I kept palpating it, poking it, trying to remember if it had been there before. I couldn’t recall, I couldn’t be sure, so I made an appointment with the doctor to get it checked. Now it’s just a few days waiting to get in and see the her. And as I wait, I consider: On one hand, I am stressed. Of course, my precious body is in peril, my most beloved of possessions that I use to make me ME.
On the other hand, when I zoom out, past my own myopic fear, I can’t help but think about how common this is: At least 5 or 6 friends, my age or younger, have found lumps. One is being treated for breast cancer now. So many women go through this –Find a lump, stress. Get the painful workup, stress. When my friends have gone through this, I lend a tender ear, say comforting things, hope for the best of course. But when it’s them, honestly, it’s not all that important to me. When it’s them, I don’t stress. Now that it is me, my turn, it’s stress city.
But I need a turn to die. It’ll be something someday. This body is designed to fall into disease, that is the nature of rupa. It is so so normal, and yet when I fear it is my turn I get so stressed-out just because I have invested in this body, because I mistakenly believe the stories I use it to tell are real and meaningful. The body offers the medium, the substrate, that can turn a sequence of events, of causes and effects, into what I perceive as a cogent, continuous, purposeful narrative. In truth, it is trivial, meaningless, a miniscule blip in the infinite, timeless, sea of arisings and ceasings, the sea of countless women and countless cancers and countless deaths.
I get caught up in this idea that I ‘need’ this body for the future, even through whatever is needed for the future is, by definition, gonna be present. I am simply mistaking my preferred, imagined future, for THE FUTURE. My future story is just that, a story, a fabrication, some shit I am continually making-up. A story about a house is nonsense before the house is built and after it has collapsed. The Alana story is nonesense without the body prop and it ends when the body ends; there is no alana future at that point, no matter what fantasies, what ‘needs’ I have made-up.
Moreover, if I want to concoct a story dependent on a prop, I really do need a controllable prop to lay that story on. This body, as is evidenced by the lump in my chest, is not a controllable prop. This is not a controllable story.
Even if we aren’t talking about the life and death shit,—in the mundane day-to-day –- does it feel at all like I am controlling either body or narrative? For 18 months, I isolated this body to protect it from Covid; I forfeited my desires, my fantasies, I delayed travel and adventure, all the ‘fun stuff’ I like to think makes life worth living.
And when I got long covid, was I dictating the terms of use then? For most of my adult life I identified with fitness, activity, strength; with long covid I couldn’t get off the couch, better yet BE A FIT ALANA.
I like to think I have this body as an instrument of my will, some prop to do what I want, to manifest my story, my sense of who I am. But it dictates the terms. To preserve it, I need to work, adjust, and even then it is continually breaking or threatening its imminent demise. It is continually showing me that the stories of the future I like to tell are ungrounded nonsense that will be chewed-up and spit out by the actual FUTURE.
