*editor’s note – this is not a pity party*
I hear my voice on the CD recording of my interview on a recent radio show for a fundraiser I am running. I sound good, knowledgeble. I sound professional without being snotty. I sound heartbreaking at times, strong at others. I sound LIKE me but I am disbelieving.
When I hear my voice talk about it, excited at parts when I know I’ve (almost) come out the other side, voice quivering when I talk about the journey I went through, I can’t wrap my brain around having been through all of this. It feels like a bad dream. I can recall the visions in my brain, I remember the feeling attached to the memory, but it still seems unfathomable, unreal, too bad to have happened. But it did. I hear the voice, I KNOW it’s mine – I remember it all (some more vividly than others). I know this, yet I still feel like I’m looking in reading and knowing someone else’s story, not my own.
Am I an activist. Yes. Do I feel like one? No.
Am I survivor? Yes, of sorts.
Have I been through trauma? I have learned that yes, I have.
Have I impacted others? Apparently so.
I know this. I have experienced it. Sometimes I just stop feeling it so that I can get through the day. If I thought back to all the things that brought me to this point, the day before the second Keepin’ it Kevin fundraiser (tomorrow, 6:30-Lancaster Barnstormers, come on out!) I would break. I can’t think about it. I have to place myself outside the situation. I need to be an outsider to get through it. I need to be an outlet of information and support to everyone else. When I sit down in the stadium seats tomorrow night after announcing our cause, after watching Lauren from Angiosarcoma Awareness throw out the first pitch and hear the vibrant young voice of Rebecca who supports our cause sing the National Anthem, or hear the statistics of Sarcoma, and see the survivors and family and friends out to suppor this cause; when I sit down after all of that, then I can feel it. I can sob. Or maybe I can tear a little now to feel it, to put heart into it to keep going the next 36 hours until the event is well under way.
This is me, and my life, and my cause, but sometimes, it doesn’t feel possible to be real. It’s too sad. Too much.
