Shame – Frantic Shanti

Showing Self-Mercy

^{(Title image: Photo by Melanie Stander on Unsplash)}

My oncologist keeps telling me that I’m too hard on myself.

This has been something he’s repeated for the nine years that I’ve known him. He says this when I express my frustration with not being as strong or resilient as I used to be. When I complain that I can’t lift as much weight and get injured more easily.

“Relax,” he tells me. But I have a desperate drive that pushes me, as if I’m fearful of stopping or even just slowing down. As if I’m going to sink if I rest for a while.

It’s not just my workouts in which I feel this. It’s also apparent in my professional life which, I admit, did not head down the path that I was expecting it to, and cancer didn’t help. Now, at a time in my life when I’m supposed to be winding down and enjoying a retirement coming in the not-so-distant future…no, I tell myself there’s still so much more to do to get myself to a point where I can finally rest.

Yes, this would be me. No excuses.
(Photo by Jordan Whitfield on Unsplash)

Well, I needed to get that off my chest. As you can image, this kind of mentality has some downsides.

I was reminded of that when, last week, I was again invited to present during an event in which I’ve participated for the past two years. It’s one that I spend about four months practicing for.

The first time in 2024 I was mildly anxious but everything went very well. I couldn’t wait to do it again in 2025.

But last year was really tough for me. I was grieving the death of my father, dealing with weird migraine auras, working on a professional certification that I felt insufficiently prepared for and trying to juggle some major financial changes in my life. I didn’t have the same amount of time to prepare and, consumed by self-doubt, I allowed anxiety to creep in.

No, wait. That’s a lie.

Anxiety didn’t “creep in”, it hit me like a tidal wave. Preparing for an event that should have been amazingly positive and allowed me to showcase my expertise instead kept me up at night. It made me miserable. I obsessed over preparations and couldn’t wait for it to be over.

My presentation came and went well enough. But the experience left me feeling wounded.

Like I said, 2025 was a difficult year with major changes in my life. It stayed difficult up until the last days of December, when I finally had a chance to decompress and enjoy where I was in the present moment.

But when I recently received the invite to once again participate in this year’s event, I felt a familiar undercurrent of panic and despair. And that elicited shame.

First, I tried not to think about it. But that didn’t work well and my anxiety grew. I really wished that I could find an excuse to skip this year but I couldn’t turn it down—that would be “giving up” which would have left me defeated.

Or would it have?

Cutting myself some slack after a lifetime of beating myself up feels like the way I expect these kittens feel.
(Photo by Chirag Bhardwaj on Unsplash)

I have spent so much of my life doing things “for my own good”. When it comes to exercise, that is a very good thing indeed. But what about when doing something genuinely results in anxiety and dread? I had a long track record of pushing through those situations. Over and over again, I would barrel headlong into them, figuring that the more I did things like this, the more comfortable I would get with them. Although it didn’t always work like that. Sometimes, all it did was allow anxiety around it to build even more, painted with self-criticism for feeling that way.

But what if, instead of beating myself up, I took a breath and showed myself some grace? Just this once?

I poked at the possibility of declining the opportunity to present this year, just to test out how I would feel about it. And it immediately felt like a relief. All that anxiety fell away and I saw all the other things I could spend my time doing that I would otherwise put off because practicing required so much mental energy. I made the decision to listen to what my brain and body were yelling at me.

“For Pete’s sake…!“

This wasn’t a cop-out. This was giving my worn-out self a little love. I need more of that.

Dampening the Echoes of the Past

(Title image: Photo by Anastasiya Badun on Unsplash)

The Advent season is a perfect time for introspection and mindfulness. For me, 2023 has had challenges and as a result has served as a proving ground for different calming techniques.

One of the things I’ve grappled with, usually in the wee hours of morning, is the persistence of uncomfortable memories from the past.

It reminds me of a one-panel comic that I saw some time ago: a person lying in bed, eyes wide, a theater marquis over their head that reads in bright lights: PLAYING AT 3AM! EVERYTHING YOU SAID AT THE PARTY LAST NIGHT! [A cartoon in the same general vein by Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell appeared in The New Yorker on Jan 21, 2019 (#11 of 15), but I’m not posting it here because they might be touchy about copyright infringement.]

In the middle of the night, being hit with an glaring memory of something that sends your stress levels rocketing…goodbye sleep.
(Photo by Gregory Brainard on Unsplash)

How many of us have had a similar experience? I occasionally find myself tortured by things I said or did even decades ago. DECADES! Or they could have happened yesterday. A simple image can trigger shame, embarrassment or regret that feels real and vivid and, yes, while this generally happens at night for me, it’s certainly not limited to that time.

How odd that we give the past so much power over us when it’s not even real anymore. While we’re shaped by our experiences, allowing ourselves to be haunted by them serves no purpose, especially not once we’ve learned whatever we needed to from them.

Soooo, one early morning in the darkness I found a way to add some perspective to the memories that bully me: I started thinking of them as echoes, wispy harmless reminders of what happened.

And there in bed at 3am, I am safe. My body is not in the imagined situation, it’s under the covers, lying on my mattress. Here is where mindfulness is so helpful because it brings me back to the present. The past is echoing, trying to get my attention. But the more aware I am of where I am in space currently, the easier it is to step back and simply observe the echoes, watching them fade away.

I’m making this sound simple, I know–as with all the things that bounce around inside our heads, taming a stressful memory is not necessarily easy. But identifying it as just an echo has been remarkably helpful for me. It has provided a different viewing angle that enabled my perspective to shift.

Echo…echo…echo…

Thinking of thoughts as echoes can dispell them, but simultaneously focusing on a sense helps ground us in reality.
(Photo by Mariana Rascão on Unsplash)

I’m not there now, those other people are not there now, that event is not happening now–just because I remember it so vividly doesn’t mean that anyone else does. And most of the time, I don’t remember it either. Only during the limited, wee-morning-hour viewing window during which it appears because I’m susceptible to the tickle of anxiety.

The senses can bring me back to reality. Opening the eyes, feeling where my body contacts the surface that it’s on, hearing the hum of a fan or sound machine. Anything occuring in the present anchors me to what’s going on now.

And in the present, that echo cannot hurt me because it’s just an airy thought.

Of course, this all comes back to the basic idea that the more we practice presence, the easier it will be to minimize the impact of thoughts that unsettle us. It may take some exploration to find what works best for you, but in the end, being patient and consistent will be the best way to calm your mind and bring you back to what is real at the moment.

Things I Wish I’d Known About Breast Cancer, Part 1

Cancer, perhaps more than any other disease, has a formidable reputation that precedes it. Because of this, cancer “lore” can affect your expectations of treatment effects and anticipated prognosis if you are unfortunate enough to receive a diagnosis.

There were a number of things that I didn’t realize about breast cancer that might have made my experience, if not better, at least slightly less harrowing. Here are a few of them, in no particular order:

1. Breast cancer research remains more highly funded than that any other cancer (source: 2019 Northwestern University estimate) and is therefore the best-studied type of cancer. As a result the treatment plan is solid. While this does depend somewhat on the type of breast cancer you have (Triple-Negative, Triple-Positive, Hormone Receptor-Positive, Inflammatory, etc.), the fact remains that there is great interest in “saving the boobies”.

We are living in an era where research in breast cancer is churning out valuable findings at a break-neck pace.

Your treatment plan has likely been well-tested with ample positive outcomes. Combine this with the tendency for this cancer to be diagnosed at earlier stages due to the relative ease in finding a tumor (I mean, you can feel the lump even if it’s not very big), survival rates tend to be very good. Understandably, that might not be very comforting at the time that you’re hit with the news that you have breast cancer, but it is a blessing that you’ll appreciate later.

2. Getting breast cancer is not your fault. I struggled with this one for a loooong time. If you’ve read some of my earliest posts, you know that I not only had a hard time getting my head around my diagnosis, but also a lot of anger about everything I did that was considered “protective” that seemed not to make any difference.

The reality is, as much as we do know about cancer, there’s still a lot we don’t, which means you can be doing everything right — even “perfectly” — and still be diagnosed with breast cancer.

The message I got from cancer-prevention campaigns was that there was so much you could do to avoid the disease. I checked off all those boxes and thought that I was at very low risk. I was “the fit one”, the vegetarian, a dutiful breast-feeding mom allowing myself no indulgences — the last person you’d imagine this happening to, but it did.

I felt ashamed about the diagnosis, even feared that I would be accused of lying about my healthy habits. I was terrified that my healthy lifestyle had somehow backfired. While this sounds ridiculous now, feeling so out-of-control about my own health was demoralizing and depressing.

3. A healthy lifestyle goes a long way in making recovery easier. While I felt dejected about not being able to avoid breast cancer, my exercise and dietary habits helped me recover from treatment side effects faster and not gain weight afterwards. And as I learned later, by maintaining an active lifestyle, I was significantly decreasing my chances of cancer recurrence. I wrote about those findings in this post.

So all my efforts were not for naught. Word to the wise: if you don’t exercise regularly, start now. If you do exercise, keep going!

4. There is light in dark places. I must stress that cancer isn’t some “great” thing that happens to you and it carries with it big side effects and an ever-present risk of death. I lost two friends to breast cancer who were both diagnosed about the time that I was and they were far too young to die.

But given that I had to go through this, I had the option of “sink or swim” when it came to how I would view my experience. Eventually I found the light in the darkness of the cancer tunnel, but it did take a number of years and many ups-and-downs before I was able to appreciate the lessons that the disease taught me: being able to accept and live with uncertainty, identifying a clear purpose in my life, finding gratitude in small things, even coming to grips with my own mortality. These lessons were difficult but also valuable, and I admit that I wouldn’t have learned them if I had not gotten cancer.

Perhaps some of the most important of these were identifying that I had suffered from anxiety for a good part of my life and understanding how it had shaped my decisions. Yes, it took cancer for me to realize all that! This led to incorporating mindfulness and meditation into my daily routine.

And that is a very positive thing indeed.