Hope is too heavy to hold.

Let it hold you instead.

This full essay is for paid subscribers, as it contains very personal news and processing about my health and upcoming surgery. But I want to point out a few things: 1) I try to make the previews for my paid posts rich, so everyone here at Embodied can savor something good. 2) If you are unable to afford a paid subscription but wish you could, reach out! (Include the email address you use to sign into Substack.) I’ll comp you for a year, zero questions asked. 3) Thank you to my paid subscribers. I have been unable to work as a therapist for over a year now due to my life-threatening diseases and hard road of recovery, and your support quite literally is keeping my family fed and my surgeries paid for. Thank you. I’ve always said that hope is a team sport, and your support really does empower me to keep hoping.

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I am writing this from the lobby of our gym. My right leg is crossed over my left, and even the gentle pressure of sitting like this, like people sit, turns embers of pain into a small fire.

In a few minutes, I will enter the locker room, change into my swimsuit, and walk to the lap pool. I swim to stay sane. I swim to remember my strength. I swim to surround my body with a better story than loss and pain.

The pain of bone death is unlike any pain I’ve felt in my life. It is all consuming. It is a world champion consumer of sanity. It is gnawing me from the inside, slurping up every ounce of blood from the parts of me that were supposed to be the strongest. Touch your thigh. The bone at the center that valiantly and thanklessly bears the brunt of your weight through every day of your life is the bone that is dying in both of my knees. How do you continue to access your own strength when the strongest part of your body dies?

I signed up for a membership here the week I found out not just one but both of my distal femurs were dying. I’ll save the fuller story of that day for later, probably in my next book, but for now, I will tell you, the choice to swim saved my life.

When you are so sick that leaving bed is an olympic feat, the most desperate thing at risk of dying inside you is not simply your organs or bones, it is your hope.

I had already used every ounce of fight I had to survive almost dying. I had already poured out every pint of patience from my soul’s storehouse to endure endless months of misery and mystery. When I found out that after all of that, my bones were dying, I wasn’t sure I had anything left.

The most important diagnosis I’ve ever received is not Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder or Lupus or Avascular Necrosis; it is despair.

Despair was sucking the oxygen of hope from my soul more than Avascular Necrosis (AVN) was blocking oxygen from reaching my osteocytes.

I am not a surgeon. I hold no scalpel or drill. I cannot shift the pattern of death in the depths of my marrow. But I still bear the power of choice that can split despair in half. I still own the instruments that can reach the center of the death threatening the most important part of me.

Two little words—ones we learn to unleash before we even form memories—hold the power to save our lives. Those words are Yes and No.