Memos from the Middle

Breasts, Biopsies, and Books

I was tired of thinking about my breasts. I’d searched internet photos of mammograms and googled terms like “indeterminate hypoechoic mass,” hoping somehow that my reading skills would help reveal more than what the doctor rushed through two weeks ago. You always know something is wrong (or at least potentially troubling) when a doctor returns to the room with the nurse after a routine exam. I’d done this the first time a year ago with no sympathetic looking nurse standing stiff-bodied at the door. No doctor whose name I’d only see scrawled at the bottom of my online test results had wheeled herself close to me to explain what she thought warranted “a closer look.” The consultation was over in a flash, but by the time I got home and sat down in the quiet of the afternoon, possibilities began the swirl, and I realized I knew nothing about my breasts or what “cancer” really meant or what questions I really wanted to ask.

The last two weeks were a whirlwind of activity. I popped in and out of schools and classrooms, provided coaching, and met with principals and assistant principals all while not worrying about what may or may not be growing inside my breast. Everywhere I looked told me that four out of five biopsies come back benign, so worrying seemed far too defeatist a mentality. Instead, I allowed myself just enough think time to satisfy human curiosity while not becoming a basket case. But I got sick. Like uncontrolled hacking cough, night sweats, and body aches sick. No matter how much medicine I took, I couldn’t shake it. I realized that my suppression of emotion had manifested itself in a physical ailment when all of a sudden the sickness resolved itself as I was laying boob out on a table waiting for a comically wide-smiled doctor to stick a needle in my chest.

I had a ton of work to do when I got home. The third quarter of the school year is notoriously rough for educators and students alike, but after not prioritizing myself for weeks, I just couldn’t muster being supportive of anybody else. I just couldn’t plan or teach or serve or advise. I wanted to eat cookies and zone out. I’d ordered KE Garland‘s In Search of a Salve: Memoir of a Sex Addict and did exactly what the author advised against: I devoured the book in one sitting. That reading did what I hoped it would. It helped me divert attention from my newly biopsied breast and gave me a reprieve from helping others. But as heavy as the content of Garland’s memoir was, I wasn’t weighed down. In fact, I was oddly relieved because there on the pages of her life story, I saw so much of my own experience and hurt and rationalization. And as different as we are, I felt seen and heard by someone I’d never even met, someone whose words read oddly reminiscent of thoughts and fears I’d shared with no one else but God.

I’d felt the same way about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Myrtle, who I’d met at 15 and who’d lain dead in the street. I grieved for her because I knew her. She was always the character in that book that fascinated me the most. The one who seemed complicated, like the girls and women that dotted my life. My daughter is now reading Gatsby in her high school English class, and I confessed to her that I’d always pictured Myrtle as a Black woman (even though I know she wasn’t) because she was so real to me, real in a way white women never could be. And when I discovered Sula, fresh on the heels of my own traumatic teenaged experience, I deteriorated right along with her because I knew what it was like to slide from alive to paralysis to aloof to clingy to despondent in a lifetime too short to be called such. How did Toni Morrison know, I wondered, that we all had our Ajax that turned us into something we really were and never could be all at the same time?

As the anesthetic began to wear off, I clung to Salve and marveled at the similarities between my life and Garland’s. I could not put her book down because I needed to know if healing ever came. I know what it’s like to compartmentalize. I know what it’s like to suppress and smile. And I know what it’s like to snap in only a way that those who live with us in the silence of our private lives can see, though they rarely admit it. I thought about how common it is for Black women to mask our wounds and stamp down emotion because there is so much riding on our stoicism, so much more than we should ever be expected to bear. Our grandmothers and aunties and mothers knew that no one cared about their emotions the way they assumed people should, and in order to make it (whatever that meant to them), they had to seal up some raw part of themselves and “gift” that trait to their daughters. It’s something we don’t fully understand until we see it unwrapped by our own girls, who like us, never appreciated it and found it more suffocating than freeing. And as we watch them struggle with what we struggled with, we question if there is a way we can break the chains we unwittingly but systematically bound them in.

I, too, like Garland, am in search for a salve, but first, I have to wait on biopsy results.