Anchors

And what happened when I pulled mine up too fast

I understand now why we call newsreaders ‘anchors’. It’s about familiarity. Seeing the same person on the TV, night after night, helps us to hear the stories they’re telling.

The stories might be scary or unnerving, especially in today’s climate, but the person who’s reading them isn’t. One less thing to think about.

It’s a comfort.

The same could be said about life, I think. If the anchors are strong enough, the unknown is easier to navigate.

When I was a kid, like most, home and my parents were the anchors. The constants and the safety that allow us to fumble and fall and figure out who we are. Even today, if I say the words ‘I just want to go home’ or ‘I just want my mum’, I can feel those childhood anchors all over again.

For most of my adult life, work was my greatest anchor. It was the thing I designed my life around. As long as I was employed in a job that challenged and excited me, I was fine. I could go anywhere, and I did.

And when I got sick, the hospital and the healthcare angels became my anchors. I didn’t have to think too much because the hospital and the doctors did the thinking for me. They told told me where to be and when. They told me how I would feel and how long the discomfort would last.

Moving back to mum’s house helped too. And between the comfort of home, and the regular schedule and trips to the hospital, I almost felt like a kid again. Completely vulnerable, but held and safe at the core.

The anchors were strong.

---

One of the hardest parts of healing has been testing the old anchors to see if they work. It’s been trying new ones to find out if they will hold me steady enough to help me get back to all the things I want to do.

It’s taken a lot longer than I thought it would. And still it continues.

Initially, when active treatment ended, and the appointments started to scale back, I pulled my anchors up too quickly. Within a few days, I moved back to my house. I met with old clients. I joined a new gym. I took a trip to see all the interstate friends I’d missed so much. I threw myself completely back into my old life.

And a few weeks later, I found myself admitted to hospital with a body that couldn’t keep up with the pace I’d set for it. Even after three surgeries and sixteen rounds of chemo, I’d never felt so ruined in my life.

The anchors, I learned, were what made me feel safe. They held me during the hardest year of my life and without them, I felt like I was floating alone, tethered to nothing.

It’s a feeling I still struggle to explain, but I think it’s something to do with a loss of purpose, and of navigating a road you didn’t choose, and a whole lot of pressure to be better from a world that doesn’t always understand.

I see a similar grief in a friend whose adult children are leaving home. From another who just went through a breakup. And a different, even harder grief, in a friend who was far too young to lose her greatest anchor, her mum.

And I daresay no one is coming back from any of these events fast.

---

I once thought I would spend the year after cancer living my biggest, most exciting life. But reflecting now, I realise I’ve lived my smallest.

It’s been a year of prioritising routine, of rest, and of comfort. It’s been a year of frustration at not being able to do all the things I want to do. Of anchors gently up and anchors gently down. It’s been a year of slowly building new structures and routines that makes me feel as comforted as a kid in the 90s, and as familiar as the news anchors on their TVs.

It’s been a year of continuing to live at mum’s, of prioritising appointments with my oncologist and my psychologist and my physio. A year of daily exercise, of long stints in bed, getting used to the new drugs. A year of postponing plans, and cancelling trips and taking on work only to give it straight back.

It’s been a year of giving myself grace and plenty of time to process.

It’s a far cry from the girl I once was; the girl who spent her life sailing into unknown waters, thriving on the adrenaline and challenge of new people and new places and figuring out who she was amongst them. The one who thought success looked like never stopping.

The girl I thought I would return to.

But it’s also been a necessary move. A healing one. It’s been exactly what I needed to do. Because it’s only now, one year on, that I’m finally starting to feel steady again.