Conversation Seven
A Conversation offering one possibility — gently, and without asking you to believe it today.
I’ve waited until now to say this, because it only means anything after everything else we’ve sat with.
You have been keeping going. You adapted around things long before they were loud. Parts of you took up work that belonged elsewhere, and kept at it for years without complaint.
Which leaves one question I’d like to put in front of you.
What if your body hasn’t been failing you?
That question is not asking you to suddenly trust your body.
I know better than to ask that. Trust is built slowly and broken quickly, and a body that has kept you home, or woken you at three in the morning, or embarrassed you in front of people you love, has not exactly been earning it lately.
You are allowed to still be angry with it. You are allowed to be tired of it, or frightened of what it might do next, or quietly finished with the whole subject. You are allowed to feel, plainly, that it betrayed you. None of that has to change today, and I am not going to talk you out of any of it.
I’m asking something much smaller. I’m asking whether you could leave a little room — not certainty, just room — for the possibility that some of what you’ve been living with began as protection rather than failure.
And I want to be very clear about what this possibility does not mean, because women who have been unwell for a long time are handed a great deal of quiet blame, and I won’t add to it.
It does not mean you should have ignored less, tried harder, rested more, eaten differently, or somehow known what no one ever taught you to recognize.
You were never given this information. You were given advice, appointments, reassurance, and often the sense that you were making rather a lot of something. That you didn’t see a pattern nobody ever described to you is not a failing. It’s simply what happens to all of us.
This also isn’t a claim that everything makes sense, or that there is a tidy explanation underneath your particular life. Some of it may stay unexplained. I’d rather sit with you honestly in that than hand you a story that sounds complete.
What I’ve noticed is that the question itself changes something, long before anyone has an answer.
What’s wrong with me? is a question that closes in. You can’t do much with it except wait to be told, and it tends to leave a person smaller than it found her.
What has my body been trying to manage? opens outward. It has room in it for history, for the years you worked, for the winter that took everything you had. It treats you as someone who has been living a life rather than someone who has been going wrong.
Nothing about your body needs to have changed for that to be a better place to stand.
So I won’t offer you a solution today. There isn’t one that could honestly be given in a page, and you have been offered enough of those.
I’m offering somewhere kinder to look from. That’s all.
If the possibility feels like too much right now, set it down. It will keep. And if some quiet part of you leaned toward it while you were reading — you don’t need to do anything about that either. Just notice it happened.
— Tammie
Know someone who may need these words? You’re welcome to share this Conversation.
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Another Conversation is being written slowly, and it will be waiting here when it’s ready. Nothing is expected of you between now and then.
The conversation continues whenever you’re ready.
Whenever you’d like company again, the Conversations will be right where you left them.