You’re Not Stuck, You’re Just Growing Wings

How I'm finding hope in my year of disappointments

Sep 19, 2024

Welcome to all my new subscribers! I’m so happy you’re here. I usually send weekly posts, but life has been a little hectic recently… more on that below. I’m looking forward to getting back on track now that things are settling down.

Today, I want to talk about the unexpected challenges—and blessings—I’ve faced in 2024.

On the ferry to Catalina Island, April 2024. Photo by Paul Cook.

This year was supposed to be my year.

Approaching 2024, I was burning with excitement. More so than I can ever remember, I was hopeful for what the New Year would bring and who I’d be by the end of it. My mind was filled with lofty goals and visions of a carefree future.

After several years of feeling like my husband and I were treading water in the wake of my breast cancer diagnosis, we were itching to get on with the rest of our lives. I’d learned a few hard truths on my path to Hell and back, but I came out the other side with a renewed lease on life and forever-changed perspectives.

This Summer marked five years of maintenance treatment—my disease, thankfully, remaining in remission. I planned to take a break from the hormone therapy that’s kept me in a state of early menopause, treatment which has profoundly affected my body and delayed me being able to try for a much-longed-for baby.

And yet, despite this momentous shift towards positive change, 2024 has felt like learning to drive: one stall after another.

An argument with friends took me and my husband by surprise, and the knock-on effects only seemed to compound with each passing month.

The tail-end of the writers’ strike continues to make itself known, and the Hollywood film industry has been painfully slow. For the first time in a long time, my film-composer husband had more free time than he knew what to do with. Something that felt like a blessing at first—Lord knows, he was due a break—but soon it dragged on long enough for us both to get rattled.

My memoir manuscript has been floundering, too. After countless edits and redrafts, I’ve scant motivation to begin the next—and arguably more demanding—challenge: convincing someone to publish it. The young adult cancer guidebook I wrote with a therapist friend sits in a drawer somewhere at my hospital, still unshared with patients despite countless promises that it will be.

Slowly and yet, all at once, my husband and I became deeply unhappy in our little house just north of Los Angeles. We were lucky enough to buy it in 2022—something we thought impossible a few years earlier—and we planned to stay a while, turning our bungalow more into a home with each passing year. But we both began to feel stifled—stuck.

In the aftermath of all this disappointment, I’ve been reflecting on the building blocks of life, the elements we each must safeguard: health, love, family, friends, career and home. These are the blocks we all seek to place, one on top of another, their structure forming our happiness and identity. I thought we’d built a sturdy foundation for our quiet lives, but in a mere few months, we discovered some cracks.

Thankfully, we still have our health and each other, the blocks beneath which all others pale in comparison. Yet we’ve been perpetually fed up, our expectations failing to align with reality.

This is the worst year ever, my husband has announced several times.

No, it isn’t, I insist.

This year is not worse than the year I got cancer at 29, or the year I lost my breasts, or the year I lost my childhood best friend to the same insidious disease.

No, this year isn’t a lick like any of those.

This year is—I’ve decided—our Chrysalis year.

Many days have been dark and confusing, and we haven’t always known what would happen next. At an age when we felt confident in ourselves and our choices, everything suddenly seemed to turn upside down.

After several years of being fully faced with the fact I might die, we were just glad I was alive. We were quite happy living as unsuspecting caterpillars, cheerfully sliding along on our bellies. But apparently, life, or God, or the universe—whatever name you prefer to give to sudden, unexpected change—isn’t satisfied with us staying this way.

Post-cancer, I very much believe in not sweating the small stuff. And yet, hurt hurts. Disappointment is disappointing. And I don’t want to stay trapped in my pain any longer. So, with all my might, I’m picturing every unexpected challenge of this year as a silken strand of my own cocoon. Each setback may have made things a little scarier, but I’m choosing to believe these discomforts are all temporary: that on the other side of this year, I will emerge stronger.

Celebrating my 60th and last-ever Lupron shot. Photo by Breton Vivian.

And the year hasn’t been all bad; far from it. To my surprise, my oncologist announced I was done with treatment for good. I’ve since come off all drugs, thrown a ‘cancer graduation party,’ and now anxiously await the return of my period.

I’ve received a completely clear CT scan, a precaution I decided to seek before attempting a pregnancy.

My husband and I visited Hong Kong, where he grew up, and my dear younger brother and girlfriend came to visit us. We’ve attended three wonderful weddings and even celebrated our tenth wedding anniversary.

And I’ve started this Substack—a promise to myself that I won’t give up on my writing despite my tendency not to believe in myself. Slowly, subscribers are trickling in, each one a spark in the kindle of my dream: that my words, my voice, can have an impact on this world.

Last month, resigned to the fact we would never again be happy in our home, my husband and I decided to call it quits and sell. We packed all our belongings up in less than a week and put everything into storage. I’m writing this in our Airbnb (a little later than planned, sorry about that), hopeful that in a few months, we’ll have found our next landing spot. Whatever happens, it can’t be any worse than holding on to our disappointment.

So, this may be my Chrysalis year, but soon enough, I’ll break free. The delicate wings I’ve been growing will unfurl, transformed by the light.

Yes, when next year rolls around, I’ll be a God Damn Butterfly.

What do you tell yourself when you need hope? I’d love to hear from you in the comments! And if this is the first time you’ve come across my page, I’d be honoured if you considered subscribing. You can expect always thoughtful, occasionally funny, weekly essays about health, happiness and mortality.

I’ll be back next week. In the meantime, please share your best nuggets of wisdom in the comments below :)

Emma