Unexpected Lessons From Choosing a New Life

Have you ever been in a space where the only way forward is to create a new life? Have you found yourself in that space where your old life has ended but you’re not quite ready to start your new life? It can happen with a decision – such as ending a marriage or a long term relationship. Or other times it happens to you – a sudden illness or redundancy. Regardless of the circumstances your life as you knew it is turned upside down, and there is a period of time before you can make sense of it, and forge forward in your new life.

I recently made the agonizing decision to have a hysterectomy. It came at the end of an extremely painful 17 year battle with Endometriosis. It was a heart wrenchingly hard decision to make for all manner of reasons.

After months of agonizing over whether to have the surgery, the decision to go ahead with it was so simple yet so huge. I realised one day that I didn’t know what a life without pain was like. I couldn’t remember (other than when I was pregnant with twins and for a few months after) when I had last not had pain. I didn’t want my twins remembering me as always in pain. Most of all I wanted my life back.

Pre-surgery I had this possibly naïve idea that I would be wheeled into theatre, have all the troublesome organs removed, and then as they wheeled me out of theatre my new life would begin. You’ll be surprised to hear that that isn’t exactly what happened… I did wake up in less pain than I had been in for months, which was amazing. From a pain point of view the surgery was definitely a success.

But it turns out that even without chronic pain I still didn’t skip into my new life.

My new life involved navigating a whole new way of being. It involved me asking for help when one of the ways that I had coped with years of illness is to forge on through pain. People came and went – helping with my babies, cooking food, doing shopping, washing and cleaning. They reminded me to rest, and played with my children.

All of this required me to take a back seat with the twins when I had been the driver for EVERY decision since they had been born. I felt like a spectator of my own life which is how I felt so often having ENDOMETRIOSIS. So often sitting on the sidelines watching everyone else do the things that you wanted to do. It was hard and confronting as I had assumed the surgery would rid me of that.

Feelings of disappointment and anger about the years of pain and no one listening reared their head. The lack of support I had received from certain friends and some family crept up on me when I least expected it. The hurtful comments some people had made over the years were bouncing around my head. The fact that a lack of diagnosis meant a lot of people implied I was making it all up hit me again like it had whenever I encountered someone like that.

I was angry at a medical system that had told me nothing was wrong for 15 years whenever I had had pain. So many doctors had dismissed my symptoms and more often than not treated me like a drug addict when I presented at clinics and hospitals. I had started to believe them. Long before my diagnosis I had decided there was something wrong with me and it was all in my head.

Without even realizing I’d become convinced over the years that there was something wrong with me and that I’d created an entirely unlivable illness in my mind. Now that I had a diagnosis and no pain, it was time to let go of those thoughts. It was time to realize that I was actually ok. I was enough. I had an illness that I could not have prevented and none of it was my fault.

I was in what Lissa Rankin describes as “the spaces between stories."

And it was hard. I had countless sleepless nights as I navigated through the uncertainty. I did meditations where quite often my mind just raced around wrapping me up in circles of frustration instead of relaxing. I tried to be gentle. I tried to push. I tried to force myself to just enjoy my new life. I tried and tried and tried…

Lissa Rankin describes it perfectly when she says you can’t rush gestation.

I was creating a whole new life. I had to shed years and years of thoughts, habits and beliefs. I had to figure out who I was even though I felt like everything was spiraling out of control and I had nothing to grip onto. I had to learn to let go when my entire life and the reason my life had continued through adversity was my ability to hold on and forge ahead through any circumstance.

And through all of it I had to find a way to have a faith in myself. To forgive myself and to show myself love. Because an invisible illness that no one believes in meant that I had been so harsh and so hard on myself. I had believed others instead of listening to my body.

I felt like a kid gripping to the end of a diving board looking down into the deep end of a pool. From the dizzying height the water looked so scary but I was on the end of the board and going back down the stairs was no longer an option.

I soon realized though that trying to force myself off the board wasn’t going to work. I had to be gentle. I needed to take it one day at a time. I needed to remember that it was uncomfortable but that there was something exciting about the fact that life would never be the same.

It took weeks but I started to get comfortable with sitting up on that diving board, in the space between my old life and my new life. I decided that instead of forcing myself off that edge I would make it more homely. I got some flowers and someone gave me some books. I started to take naps and in my heart I knew that in good time, and possibly when everyone (even me) least expected it I might just pin drop off the end of it.

Lucky for me the diving board has wifi so I could touch base and write this. Have you ever been in a place like this? A place between what was and what will be? How did you make it as livable as possible?



Kat Stanley is a storyteller, research lover and conversation starter. She writes blogs that she hopes will help other women find a voice for some of those soul shattering and life altering events that life throws up. In her spare time, she is trying to figure out how to fold a fitted sheet.