Alicia Keyes Listen to This: "I am NOT Superwoman."

I've been especially neurotic lately. At least I can identify it now. When I get anxious I get ailments. Most recently, I have chosen to highlight my respiratory system. Last week, while Lee and I were lying in bed, suddenly I felt like I couldn't breathe. I made Lee go out to the car and pull his nasty public hospital stethescope out of his doctor coat and listen to my lungs. You know, I really want to be tough all of the time but I simply cannot. Lee is priviledged to witness my weaknesses and frailties. He and my housekeeper. But mostly Lee. It must be burdensome. However, I am the one that needs reassurance, so I have him listen a second and third time and assure me that my lungs aren't filled with fluid or riddled with metastatic disease.

Two girls that I know, friends, have been diagnosed with breast cancer since my diagnosis. They are both in their 30's and they both have 3 kids, 8 and younger. Being a good, supportive friend in this situation is not complication-free. As much as I want to be objective, I can't completely extract my own story from their situations. I don't think that it is just about reliving my own circumstances. Rather, I have not yet come to peace with my whole scenario. I guess it is a little bit like picking a scab off of a wound when it is almost healed. But I don't know if this sore ever completely heals. If I isolated myself I don't think that the rawness of it would go away. I'd just be by myself with this exposed nerve and I'd still be getting zapped. I guess I just need to come to terms with the notion that no one is expecting me to be the expert in 'how to be a breast cancer patient'. No one needs me to write the manual with the '10 simple steps to achieving breast cancer survival nirvana'.

Validation-it boils down to this. Somehow by helping these girls, coaching them along, it validates the year I spent wrestling with the breast cancer demons. It puts all that time to good use. In my mind, somewhere deep in my psyche, I can think, "It was all worthwhile. It was purpseful. I can recycle it and use it for something better." That is the type of girl that I am; never sitting still. I need to allow that year, 2007 and the whole frightening ride that it was, to just be. It happened and it happened to me and my family and it was unfortunate, but it is okay now. God or Lee or my parents or my family or my friends are not expecting me to make something profound and useful out of the experience. I'm doing that to myself. My only job is to be me.

Their experience, now, sends me back to those places that I did not like; the dark corners of uncertainty. I have no more control over my destiny now than I did a year and a half ago. And, I have no control over their destinies. It's between them and God, just like everyone else's life is between them and their maker. So, when my friend has to have a mastectomy and reconstruction and her 3 kids have to wait for months to hug their mother, I can cry for her. I can remember my surgery and my recovery and not sugar-coat it. It was hard for everyone. We made it through, but I can still cry for me too. Not because I am feeling sorry for myself, but because I can just let it out. I should not, nor could not, hold this sadness inside anymore than I should or could hold in a sneeze or a hiccup. Because my other friend has finished her treatment and is scared because there is no longer a battle plan and she feels helpless and out of control, I can understand her fear. I still feel her fear. I know the terror of waiting for test results because you think you have some new complication. I can tell her, "I know you are scared. I've been scared too. Whatever it is, it is going to be okay. I am here for you no matter what." I don't have to try to explain away her fears. Acknowledging them is enough.

I am not Superwoman. No one thought I was. There wasn't even a job vacancy. I made myself put on the tight, constricting costume. This is why I couldn't breathe. It was my own anxiety. This is a journey and I can simply join my friends. I don't have to lead the way and sometimes I can fall behind. As I wrote on my friend's poster to hang in her hospital room, in the word of Robert Earl Keen, "The Road Goes on Forever and the party never ends..."