The Beast

Since returning home from London, my normally low-hum anxiety has ratcheted up to a heart-racing, sleep-depriving, sanity-stealing Beast. After two months of suppressing my breast cancer diagnosis, should I have seen that coming? Probably. Did I? Nope. 

My nervous system’s baseline is the stuff of go-getter dreams – it keeps me productive and engaged. It resets with exercise, meditation, downtime and the touch of loved ones. I was so ready to come home, confident I’d tackle this illness with intensity, grace & jokes (always jokes.) When I deplaned stateside though, a beast made a home in my chest, weaving its fingers through my ribs before closing into an unyielding fist. It wakes me in the middle of the night, clenching ever-so-tightly, whispering cancer stats and flooding me with “what ifs?” 

Two weeks away from my double mastectomy, I wish the surgery was happening tomorrow. That’s a crazy thing to say, but I believe The Beast is a mix of anticipatory anxiety and grief. I’d like to get this show on the road, so I can extricate this creature from my sternum.

It’s 4am and we’ve been awake for hours, The Beast and I. I’m reflecting on the myriad ways people have stepped in and stepped up this week. For me, the purest form of love is presence. You get one life – one little life – and I couldn’t be more grateful for the people showing up in mine right now.

As I lie in the dark with The Beast clawing away at my ribcage, my mind switches to the past and to the times I was surrounded by exactly the wrong people. There’s a rather pervasive culture of selfishness in my line of work; motives run murky and words are allowed to be meaningless. This took a long time for me to understand as a young actor. Artists are verbose by nature; they lean insecure and can be prone to love-bombing as a means of nursing various attachment wounds. There’s this casual nature with which compliments are sometimes strewn about; almost an assumption that everyone is needy and must be fed. As a kid from Phoenix whose parents meant what they said, I didn’t really understand this fluffy faux kindness, nor its cagier cousin duplicity. I assimilated and tried it on for a brief period, but tapped out rather quickly. For me, words have meaning and relationships have depth. I love my job, so I carefully test the waters in which I swim. It takes a bit of time to see if someone’s actions match their words. 

My bullshitometer is well-tuned now, but it was hard won. In the early days of my life in LA, an actor swept me off my ever-loving feet. This man was bursting with talent, universally adored, hilarious, brilliant, tall, dark and handsome and oh the songs Taylor would have written! He drowned me with poetry, praise and pageantry – and I lapped up every word. To be complimented by such a wordsmith was divine. I loved the version of me he reflected back and was too naive to question it. But as the fantasy of me gave way to reality, the shift began. Turned out there wasn’t room for the real me who had needs. I watched my image fade in this man’s eyes with fascinating speed. The praise, adoration, nicknames, declarations – they vanished nearly as quickly as they’d materialized. I lost him in tiny pieces first (which he denied), then all at once (which he didn’t explain.)

I’d thought myself emotionally intelligent enough to clock vacuous praise, so my pain was real and my equilibrium shaken. With time, it was replaced by an acceptance of who he was and what he’d been after. I too had to lay down the idolized version I’d been carrying. It was hard work, but there’s grace in loving someone while they’re leaving you.  It was then I learned to let them leave because, baby, they know something you don’t know. 

All I did know was my side of the street. I only had this one little life and I chose to spend it with my heart wide open. One little life –  

The Beast snaps my attention back to cancer, clever little fucker. Not a lot of good comes from lying awake at night revisiting the ghosts of heartbreak past, but it is a nice distraction from the disease in my chest. 

It’s then that it occurs to me that my cancer is in my chest where The Beast resides. Is he clutching my ribs and trying to break me – or is he actually holding me together? Is his death grip on my heart – or on the cancer? What if he’s containing it, willing it not to spread so that I may be spared chemo? 

Perhaps I haven’t given The Beast the credit he deserves. Perhaps, as with us all, love and acceptance are what he needs. After all, even The Actor told me years later that I was the only person who’d ever loved him as he was. Sure, I liked his talent and looks, but I loved his heart. I gave him the forgiveness he needed and held him while he cried. No, I didn’t give it a second chance romantically; instead, my gut told me to hold him the way his mom hadn’t. It was neither my first nor last embrace with a scared boy who wasn’t given a fair shot at knowing how to love. There’s a particular kind of grasp and you just know. He’d hurt me, yes, but I’d also learned an invaluable lesson about empathy and compassion.

Some people are in our lives to bring pain, because there are certain kinds of growth that don’t stem from happily-ever-afters. That’s what you are, aren’t you, Beast? You’re that kind of pain, holding me accountable at night so I don’t coast through this pretending it’s not that hard. You’re seizing up when my mind wanders too far into distraction and returning me to the task at hand. You’re pointing out what to hold onto and what to let go of. I get it now and I thank you for holding me together when it would be easier to fall apart. In the darkness, I feel my chest relax as the tears well up. I drift back to sleep, finally at peace.