On Preparedness
This past week something remarkable happened for me. Between 2016 and 2018 I took a series of photos with photographer and friend Celeste Sloman chronicling my recovery from a liver transplant. She came to my home and accompanied me to doctors' appointments, to the acupuncturist and to blood draws. It was a project we took on together to raise awareness about organ donation and the patient experience. Last Saturday, National Geographic posted one of the photos on their Instagram with a caption I wrote. I knew this would be published at some point, but I didn't know when. Suddenly my inbox started blowing up: I received texts from friends and emails from people I haven't spoken to in years. I reconnected with my surgeon, who wanted to post about it on Twitter. There were so many eyes on me from people I didn't know (and an obscene number of strangers in my DMs asking for my hand in marriage 🧐).
It got me thinking about desire and readiness. As in, when are we ready to have the capacity to hold something within our system? It was an intense experience to have an Instagram account with 150 million followers who suddenly know my story, my medical history and have eyes on a photo of my scar, which is an extremely intimate part of me. Though I chat a lot of shit on the internet, I'm still a pretty secretive private person. 🤣
I've been talking about organ donation for some time, and I have wanted to raise awareness about it in a bigger way for years. Now that this bigger thing happened my aim is to continue that conversation. But there have been times when I was frustrated because I felt like my goals weren't coming to fruition fast enough. There are still so many parts of my life where I feel like things don't move fast enough. Sound familiar? I have a sneaking suspicion it does (ty, pandemic). After this happened, I realised that maybe I wouldn't have been ready to receive all the attention I got as a result of this photo if it had happened two or three years ago. The trauma I held in my body still simmered right on the surface. This came at the right moment for me to be able to process and celebrate it and also not freak the fuck out.
Sometimes we're not ready for things to happen to us: it's too much, too fast - and that's when a trauma response is likely, even if it's good! When something good like this happens and you're ready, it makes the goals taste sweeter, it makes the waiting worth it, it makes sense when nothing else does. So if there's something that feels so stuck in your life or in your body, maybe lean into the wait for right now. It could be a preparation for the mystery of the unfolding of this mad life we're in.