Lean Out: A Meditation on the Madness of Modern Life by Tara Henley

Author:Tara Henley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Appetite by Random House
Published: 2020-03-24T00:00:00+00:00

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I knew when I heard the message from my doctor’s receptionist, asking me to come straight in, that it wasn’t going to be good. I picked up the message on campus and drove to the west side of the city in a daze. Double-parked in the lane behind the office. I was shown to a treatment room right away. There, my GP opened a file, stared evenly at its contents and told me the tumor was cancerous. “This is not a death sentence,” he said gruffly. “We caught it early.”

He released me into the bright afternoon. I drove to my mother’s apartment building and sat on the steps in the hot sun in a leather jacket, unable to remove it, waiting for her to come home.

Finally, responding to messages I had left on their pagers, my two closest friends came and found me. Later, my mother arrived, shaking. We made tea and cried, all of us together on the couch. The closeness was both touching and excruciating. Simultaneously satisfying and devastating.

My mother and I went to Topanga, where my brother was working in the kitchen, and sat on the patio until he finished his shift. When we told him the news, he cried too.

The two of them—my constants, my solace in life, then and now—slept in my room that night, in my attic apartment. I had to get up at four in the morning to sit in an armchair in my study, too afraid to sleep. Reality had taken on a surreal quality. Lights were too bright. Sounds were too loud. Everything felt unreal.

How had my life changed this fast? One moment I was worried about a bad haircut, and the next I was worried about my life.

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