"I just feel really weird." I called my sister Kaela the other night after sending her a late "You up?" text, which in my 30s a "you up" text usually means: something is wrong, I need to talk. Very different than the college "You up?" text which meant: Wanna f*ck? Ahhh, the good old days. When life responsibilities were low and existential crises were years away.

I've felt weird a lot in my recovery. For many weeks it was a cognitive and physical weird. Actually, it was awful. I felt awful. Incredibly dizzy, nauseous, tilted sideways. It felt like my entire body inside was shaking and it was the strangest feeling I've ever experienced. I am so grateful that it got better because by week 3 of that I had started becoming afraid I would get stuck feeling that way forever. I'm thankful for significant improvement!

And. Right now I still sometimes feel weird but in a different way. Weird as in unsure of things. Weird as in: what happens next? What do I do right now? I know the answer to that last one: keep recovering. The other day I worked out and made dinner and those two activities wore me out. I had to rest for hours in between. This shit is humbling! Those two things were things I used to do as a small part of my day. And sometimes right now, that's the whole day. That's all I can manage! Five months out from surgery. Humbling. Sometimes I feel like a bit of a stranger in my own life. Looking around at many things exactly as they were "before" everything happened. But I feel so different. And I'm not totally sure what that fully means yet because some things just take time. Right now I'm figuring out how to re-relate to my own life in ways that honor how I feel now.

I still get dizzy when I bend over. Getting off the floor is really difficult for me and I forget that every time until I have to do this strange flip to the side thing and I'm like: Well, I'm glad nobody is here to see this! Sometimes I get embarrassed for myself when I get confused or turned around in a conversation. I said to Chris the other day: Stop! You're confusing me. Slow down. What did you just say? I'm lost in this conversation.

I sometimes still have trouble finding words or articulating myself. The word was right there and then it's gone. And I'm stumbling over myself. Or I had something I was just about to say and then: totally gone. Not a trace of it remaining. It's not my favorite but I trust it's temporary. Talking, expressing myself has never been an issue for me! Some may say I should stfu more ;) And I would say to those people: Sometimes, you are right.

It can be a mind fuck because I look so "normal." Normal as in: the me before all of this. My previous normal. I have a cute (??) mullet situation in the back of my head now and one day, my hair will be totally filled in. Just looking at myself, I can almost pretend nothing happened. Chris and I will look at one another sometimes and just be like: A brain tumor? What the what?! We took a selfie at a doctors appointment the other day and he was like, "Well, I think we look pretty good." And I agreed. We don't look like what we've been through. Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of moments I'm having a big ole ugly cry and I look exactly like how I feel. But in regular moments, I really could pretend none of it happened. It's a strange feeling.

I am reminded of the surgery many times a day in big and small ways. When my head is itchy from the hair growing (a lot right now still) and I touch the back of my head, feeling the ident where the tumor and part of my brain used to be. Whenever I get tired and my walking becomes lopsided, rigid and unsteady (every evening and many days if I'm just not feeling good). In the evenings when my brain just isn't a sharp. In moments where I find myself incredibly confused cognitively. In each day when I have to go sit or lay down in between tasks. When I have to plan to run my errands in the mid morning when I feel best but have to be mindful to do no more than 2 or risk paying for it the next day. It's weird but also quite amazing how I've adapted to work with my changing capacity. Currently, I feel like I've gone a bit backwards and hit a plateau. Chris and I checked in the other day and I was like: I feel really shitty again most days for at least part of the day, my energy levels feel like they've dropped off and I feel stalled. You think something is wrong? And he was like: Um, yeah? You're recovering from brain surgery. What's wrong is your unrealistic expectations of yourself.

Oh. Yeah. Fair point. May we all have people around us who will tell us about ourselves.

I know there's nothing to be embarrassed about in this process. This is just my current capacity and it has been a big adjustment and shift for me. It has brought grief up. And also: I am continuing to heal and recognize the true miracle of my recovery. I am very aware of how this could have gone. I have looked for people like me with my kind of brain tumor (through Google, Tik Tok, Reddit, Insta) and usually what I have found looks very different from my story: Folks in their 30s who have been diagnosed at later stages. Multiple brain surgeries, radiation, chemotherapy. Reckoning with what this means for their lives. Finding people who shared so much and then suddenly: no more posts. I wonder if they are still alive. I wonder if they are just too sick to share. I wonder if they have just decided they don't want to talk about it publicly anymore. The sudden cease in sharing feels loud when I come across it.

Those online searches always end solemnly for me: I am both immensely grateful for the miraculous early discovery of this tumor and what I know will be a full recovery and I am deeply saddened for the people I've found. And for realizing how this could have ended up for me if this was found just a few years later. Humbling. Feelings of guilt. Flashes of recognition that the very things I am frustrated with in my recovery right now are temporary and things that other people would do anything to have be their most frustrating issue. A lot of humility in this process.

When I had my double mastectomy in 2017, I was angry at how much help I needed. Physically and emotionally. How long healing took. I felt like it was such an inconvenience and was annoyed at how it was "disrupting my life." I did not yet know how to let something humble me. To let something change me. I'm glad with this surgery and process that I am older, a tad bit wiser and that I recognize it's important to let myself be changed by this. Fighting that is really just fighting myself and to be honest, the world will sometimes do enough kicking the shit outta us so we don't need to add to that!

When I think of the word humility, when I think about being humbled by this process I think of it more like: Growing up. Realizing most things are out of my control except for how I choose to respond to them. The humbling recognition of just how much I need other people and that my relationships are *the* most important thing in my life. That when everything goes to shit, that's what doesn't (for the most part). The humility of realizing some of my priorities were fucked. Of recognizing how I behaved selfishly in my partnership with Chris and what needed to change immediately. And making the changes.

I've had months to be. To think. Weeks where I could do nothing else but exist. Wait for time to pass so I could feel better. To look around at my life and be honest about myself and my choices. Both past and present. To reckon with feelings of true remorse. To think about my sobriety. All of it. I keep joking with my sister and quoting Kylie Jenner from 2016 because you gotta laugh:

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One important realization: In the last few years, I did not take the kind of care of my body that it deserved. I put it under a ton of stress. And so now one of my big recovery focuses is loving nourishment of myself. Of Chris. Of my life. A humbling realization when I've spent years learning to take better care of myself. The requirement from my body and life right now that I get even better at it. That maybe I was not doing as good of a job as I thought. Or that the shit that worked at 25 doesn't work now.

The realization that in my partnership, I often did things resentfully and then acted like I wasn't resentful. Yuck! That I would huff and puff about shit that comes with the territory of being an adult, owning a home, building a life with someone. The truth is that it was spoiled brat and entitled behavior. That needed to change in order to honor my quest to behave less like an asshole. And to have the kind of loving, regenerative, healthy adult relationships I desire.

Lots of realizations. All very humbling. Continuing to recognize just how long healing can take. Coming to terms with it. Continuing to practice patience (screams internally in Aries rising). Knowing that my job right now is to continue recovering and that's okay! We'll get there. Slow and steady. Making sure I am continuing to take stock of my life, of the small daily choices I make that have big long term impacts on my quality of living. Holding onto the perspective shifting I've gained in this last year that would be so easy to lose so quickly if I rushed back into everything. Uncomfortable? Sometimes. Humbling? Absolutely. But incredibly liberating as well.

And more than anything: I'm so glad to fucking be here!

It's brought me so much joy to write to you all here. Thank you for witnessing. Thanks for writing back to me. It feels like dipping my toes back into the water when it comes to my work. Of course I want to fling myself full force into everything at least four times a week, but again: Recovery is humbling. Even writing to you here takes me 3 times as long as it did "before." A lot more focus and energy. The need to rest in between paragraphs or as I edit it. That's just what it is right now. But it feels good to write, to create, to share in this way. And if I can workout, make dinner and write to you? Well, then that's a good day right there for me. One thing at a time. Slow and steady.

Love y'all,

Alyssa