Bree Stilwell

There was no single breaking point that led to my deflation into a kitchen bar stool; it was more so from a slow and noxious leak. Smaller, but cumulative ruptures sustained over days and weeks.

It was my husband’s anxiety-impaired ex-wife stress, step-mothering a very fearful and repressed 11 year-old boy stress, surprise $8K copay for a 21-day supply of drug I’ve been taking for over three years and that’s crucial to my healing from stage IV metastatic breast cancer stress, the 15+ hours (and running) I’ve spent on the phone with my insurance provider, financial assistance programs, pharmacy reps and the jackals at Pfizer to resolve said issue stress.

(If you have any interest in a rant-post about how the modern medical-industrial complex is literally focus grouping us to prove how much we’re willing to pay to BE ALIVE, stay tuned. Coming soon to an in-box near you… I can’t not write about it.)

And yet, that day on the countertop – my body in an adaptive child’s pose, melted to the surface like body-shaped kid slime – proved to be a transition versus a collapse. A liminal space instead of a hard stop.

A brief hibernation from which I ultimately peeled myself out from… groggy as hell, sore and creaky, but restored in some inexplicable way.

I moved through and onward, because I refused to do anything but.

In the days since, I’ve thought a lot about my last post, about the slammed door of the words ‘I can’t.’

In it, I explored the damage we do to ourselves in saying that we can’t, that we have no resource to do a thing, when in fact we’re making a choice to not do that thing.

‘We so often use these words as an endpoint, as a terminus to action versus an indication of the need for a new or different action.’

Telling ourselves, or others, that we can’t, denies us the gift of possibility. And that can be pretty tragic.

But… guess what helped pull me out of my tailspin of several days ago? Those exact frigging words.

Let’s take one of the many wildfires that blew through these parts: the completely absurd and untenable issue of an eight thousand dollar prescription refill.

I won’t get into the bureaucratic nonsense of it here, but know this—there were a few options available to just pay for the damn thing and move on. My lovely parents offered money, we’ve got credit for such unexpected expenditures, savings accounts, etc., and yet, I flatly refused.

I literally used the words, ‘I can’t, and I won’t’ in an emailed response to my inept and now completely fired oncologist’s advisements on how to proceed. It wasn’t that I didn’t have the resource, it was instead both a rejection AND… a seizing of control.

What I was really doing was taking the wheel. And it worked, with every single one of these crazy-making situations piling up in front of me.

My husband’s ex-wife quarterbacking our parenting in real time, her micro-invasions into our life reaching peak disruption, yet another pinnacle in a repeated cycle of disordered behavior?

I can’t.

I said the words to myself and I called a lawyer. I said the words to my husband and we’ve had the most constructive conversations on the topic to date. I’ve repeated the words and we’re, together, erecting new boundaries, assigning more effective consequences.

The insurance reps I spent hours arguing with, reading from their phone-tree prompts without any true understanding of the complexities of my particular situation, telling me ‘a specialist’ would get back to me within 24-48 hours?

I can’t.

I connected with an independent health care consultant instead. I went straight to the manufacturer. I made friends with the billing department at the speciality pharmacy I’m forced to use and they are all now completely invested in my case.

And my so sweet and also so injured 11 year-old stepson? His rejection of my role in his life, of my love and care and guidance, empathy, support and interest in his life?

I also can’t.

I immediately felt the power that lies in the deflection of impact.

Now that I’m writing about it, though, it’s actually more of a semi-permeable barrier, this refusal, particularly with anything having to do with stepmom’ing. I still feel all the feels that are baked into loving and caring for a person, for this sweet boy, and also, am protected by an imperceptible-to-others layer of I can’t.

Like sunscreen for the heart, letting the nutritional in and keeping the deadly out.

I’ve been long fascinated by the concept and practice of Ataraxia; meaning, to the ancient Greeks who coined it, ‘a lucid state of robust equanimity characterized by ongoing freedom from distress and worry.’

It’s tranquility, but 2.0. It’s the freedom of disturbance by external things, which is so much more than just being cool, relaxed, unperturbed or… heartless.

I bring this up now because, well, because it’s super compelling to me, but also because I can’t tell you how many times I read or was told to just let this shit roll off my back. Like a duck. Or a nonstick skillet. Neither of which I am.

This approach never felt right to me. It seemed like a gateway drug straight to heartless. But the alternative, that semi-permeable state, is wildly unstable. And don’t we really need and want stability in the midst of chaos??

The thing that I’m coming around to with these recent insights is what I’d argue is a ballast to that uncertainty, and it is the deploying of one’s convictions.

‘I can’t’ isn’t exclusively used as an excuse for not doing the hard thing, it can in fact be the hard thing itself.

Asking for all of us, what do you think? Am I nuts? Is this all just semantics??

Have you too made active refusals in your life in favor of what you need and want? How’d it go?