I Feel Sorry for Myself

Yes, I just toasted the end of cancer. But there's still grief in my body. Fear of recurrence and death. Can we make space for "sorry-ing"? For sacred time that allows us to live our fullest lives?

Is there anything worse than someone wallowing in self-pity? Wasting time feeling sorry for themselves? Refusing to buck up and get on with life?

I believe there is.

What’s worse is not taking the time to tend to our wounds. To feel our least-comfortable emotions. To acknowledge the terror of our deepest fears.

At least it is for me.

I didn’t expect to be spending today in a tender place, reflecting on sadness, hurt and existential anxiety.

But so it went when I stepped in my last scheduled “somatic therapy” session this morning.

***

Seeing my therapist, Livanna, marked a bookend of sorts. I had seen her just before being diagnosed with appendix cancer last year. And our session then focused on my abdomen—the shame I felt about it growing bigger in recent years, and the forgiveness I gave myself for developing a “soft belly for hard times.”

We seemed to be tapping into something nearly psychic in focusing on my belly back then. Weeks later, I embarked on a roughly year-long adventure to remove cancer from my gut.

Today’s session felt similarly profound and surprising. On the calendar, it seemed part of my return to more normal times. To my moving past cancer and into a future of meaningful work, richer relationships and a fuller life.

After all, I toasted to the end of the cancer experience just this past Sunday. I got through six months of chemotherapy and a 10-hour operation on my gut. My surgeon reported he succeeded in removing all visible tumors, then washed my belly with hot chemo to kill off microscopic rogue cells. I’m effectively cancer-free. I’m 80% or so back to my full strength.

And I’m about to travel for work and pleasure in the coming weeks.

I don’t regret that ceremony of closure. I don’t deny I’m looking forward to the months and years ahead.

But the session with Livanna revealed there isn’t a tidy conclusion to my cancer chapter. It is part of my life now and going forward.

***

Our session in a San Francisco dance studio started with my highlighting body aches and pains I was feeling. I mentioned a muscle pull in my chest as well as hyperextended big toes.

Livanna helped me see those tweaks in a bigger context. That my chest has been helping to “hold together” the rest of my body while my abdomen was traumatized by surgery.

And my aching toes may be signaling that I’m not ready to run fullspeed back into the regular world. That I may need to take baby steps.

Beyond the minor injuries, I named a bigger issue weighing on me. There’s a roughly 75 percent chance this cancer will come back in the next several years.

I told Livanna I feel schizophrenic in this moment. I’m torn between euphoria at becoming cancer free and despair at the likehood of cancer catching me again. And the possibility I won’t or can’t rise to the occasion again. I fear the illness will be the death of me—maybe far sooner than I’d like.

Similar to how Livanna helped me feel my belly shame and forgive myself a year ago, she now helped me embody my emotions at this transition moment.

Despair, she said, can give way to grief.

And grief, I know, can lead to true healing.

***

Livanna made up a word I love: sorry as a verb. Can we make space for “sorry-ing?” she asked me. For saying sorry to ourselves, to our bodies, for the pain we have endured or continue to endure?

A cousin concept she shared was the way we can map time as straight-forward, cyclical or sacred. Our typical existence is dominated by a linear notion of time, with a bit of room for cycles like seasons.

What we don’t make much space or time for is sacred time—when we are at our most soulful. Most attuned to the mysteries of life and death. To the inkings and louder callings of our spirit.

In that room today, I think I stepped into sacred time for a spell. And to a place of sorry-ing.

Unconsciously, I had arced over in a seated position. I was leaning forward and rubbing my big toes. In effect, I was comforting myself. Saying soundless sorries to my body. Hugging my internal organs and seeking to alleviate the pain in my feet.

***

I imagine some influencers in the manosphere would mock this behavior as the pitiful actions of a “beta” male, one not strong enough to weather life’s storms and come out “on top.”

Indeed, part of me worries they might be right. I know, for example, that it would not serve me or my family to remain in a self-soothing pose for days, weeks, months, years. And I worry that lingering physical ailments and dread about a cancer recurrence will hurt my ability to earn a living as I surface from months of not needing to think about money.

But there’s another way to look at sorry-ing ourselves. The pressure put on us men, especially, to “present” as a person impervious to injury, highly indepedent and with an always-positive attitude can backfire.

Men who perform that confined version of masculinity can show up as rigid, cold and isolated in a world now calling for agility, warmth and connection.

In fact, I had an insight with Livanna that the way I’m going to succeed as a professional moving forward is to lean into honesty. To acknowledge the suffering I’m experiencing along with the joy. And to share the ways I’m trying to heal myself in a holistic way.

“If I do this, I think people will be drawn to me,” I told Livanna.

I wasn’t trying to be braggy. I was just reflecting on the very positive responses I’ve had to my attempts to convey my experience with cancer this past year—including lows as well as highs.

***

Toward the end of our session, I thanked Livanna. “You are a remarkable healer,” I told her.

“You’re a healer, too,” she responded.

Wait, what?!

Her words surprised me—I’ve been on the receiving end of hundreds of healers this past year. But calling me a healer makes a certain sense in light of the way I’ve been trying to help others learn from my cancer journey.

(Here, I was tempted to add to the over-the-top meme-fest started by Donald Trump portraying himself as a healing Jesus. How about this one of Buffalo Sabres coach Lindy Ruff saving the long-suffering hockey team by taking it to the playoffs this year?!

But Google wouldn’t seem to let me create an image of me as a Trump/Ruff/Jesus-like healer. That’s probably for the best!)

***

If I am a healer, then I can’t help but bust the taboo against tending to our hurts and feeling our feels. Aren’t physicians and other healers supposed to heal themselves?

I think so. And that requires candor about our wounds, before cleaning them and stitching them up.

So I’m saying it loud and proud:

I feel sorry for myself.