5 Years 5 Months 28 Days

As y’all are probably aware, we enter a new quarter next week on Wednesday. On that note, how are y’all tracking with your 2020 goals now that we are more or less done with Q1? I had a super slow *rolls eyes* start to the year but I FINALLY! had a breakthrough last week:

In my Karibu 2020 post I wrote that my number 1a) agenda of 2020 is to tell my mum’s story, but Q2 is here next week and I am yet to share a single post on JS Kicking Cancer’s Ass 😐

But I can explain.

The thing is, I have been taking my time with this because I am scared. My mum’s battle with breast cancer and subsequent death broke me and I am scared that retelling it might just break me all over again.

We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.
Anais Nin

But I have to. Of course I want to as well – duhh! *JS voice* – but even more than that I know I have to. I know deep in my heart that one of the things that is my life’s purpose is to tell my mum’s story. Fun fact: ‘My Mum’s Story’ was the working title of this post 🙂 I first touched on her story in October 2018 in the inaugural blog post of my 31 on 13 series that you can read here. The post’s title is also the name of the tag for this series: JS Kicking Cancer’s Ass.

Let me explain how tags work:

If you click the link below, it will take you to the landing page that has all the posts I have written and will write about my mum’s battle with cancer. Because even the battles lost are still worth telling.

https://lwiletheleo.com/tag/js-kicking-cancers-ass/

For anyone curious my other tags are:

Every now and then my therapist tells me to be careful not to retraumatise myself as I try to help others also struggling with their mental health. But even before she told me that I knew, as you now know, that telling my mum’s story would retraumatise me. I just did not know how to articulate it that way. Which is why it was important for me to begin therapy last year so that when I start telling my mum’s story this year, my therapist and I would have already have established a rapport.

Another reason I took my time was because my mum was diagnosed with stage four breast cancer on Friday June 15, 2012 and died on Wednesday December 13, 2017. There are 5 years, 5 months and 28 days between those two dates. Trying to figure out how the hell to tell everything that happened between those two dates was incredibly overwhelming and the major reason I really struggled to come up with a content calendar. Then add the fact that so much time has passed, and continues to pass, since shit hit the fan. Meaning my chances of remembering everything that happened since June 15, 2012 are next to nothing, and I couldn’t even.

But I finally had a breakthrough last week and came up with the possibly brilliant idea to tell my mum’s story in 13 posts. If why ‘13 posts’ is not obvious, it is because my mum died on the 13^th. Each of the 13 posts will have a different theme and up first is ‘The Paralysis’.

The reason I use the word ‘possibly’ is because I only have 11 themes 😐 but I am confident I will come up with the remaining two in time. Breaking down 5 years, 5 months and 28 days of JS Kicking Cancer’s Ass into the more bite sized pieces of 13 themes helped make telling the story less overwhelming. Which then helps manage my anxiety that tends to overwhelm me a lot of the time.

Today is the last Wednesday of my mum’s birthmonth. Meaning the last blog post of my mum’s birthmonth. She would have been 61 this International Women’s Day (you can read about what I did on her birthday here) so I have intentionally chosen today’s post to announce that I start telling my mum’s story on April 8^th. I last wrote about my mum’s story in February 2019 in C Is For Chemotherapy that you can read here to catch up before we resume the tale next month.

As I tell my mum’s story I hope her journey comforts and inspires as necessary. You will laugh, you will cry. I did.