Nicole’s Story Part II: I Can See Clearly Now
Losing multiple layers of skin and all her toenails was Nicole Christie’s first wake-up call, but not her last. Nine months after that harrowing incident, her body sent another alarm that helped her see how she was severely abandoning herself by allowing people to bully and belittle her to the point of losing herself. This time, the lessons were more painful and much harder won—but they stuck.
If gory medical photos are your jam, check them out below:
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[00:00:02] Welcome to Here For Me: a podcast about the power of choosing yourself. I'm Nicole Christie, and I'm honored to be here with you to share life altering stories, lessons learned, and advice from leading experts that will help you show up for yourself with the love, honor, compassion, and encouragement you give to others. Because just as we say, ‘I'm here for you’ to show we care for someone, saying ‘I'm here for me’ to ourselves, is the best form of self-care.
In episode one, we talked about boundaries and how the literal disintegration of my body's ultimate boundaries, my skin and nails, led me to reflect on how squishy my boundaries were when it came to recognizing and articulating my needs in all aspects of life. But in case you thought that was an end-all, be-all lesson that led to a 180-degree shift in how I show up in life: I still had more to learn.
Nine months later, my body sent me another signal that I was still abandoning myself. This time I was forced to recognize that I was allowing other people to bully and belittle me into playing small. I hadn't clearly seen these situations for what they were and thought I was being empathetic, caring for others, and taking the high road by taking a back seat. So, what opened my eyes? As I said in episode one, I've always been someone whose body is a beacon for what is going on in their life.
[00:01:31] So in 2019, my body burst out into those target-shaped lesions and I lost multiple layers of skin and all my toenails. My body's ultimate boundaries were a metaphor for how I wasn't advocating for myself or my needs. I really thought that was the wakeup call. But nine months later, in March of 2020, first there was a global pandemic, and two weeks later I noticed that my eye was watering constantly. And I figured, this is my first spring living in San Diego. I probably have allergies. And I was wiping my eye, and my lower left eyelid got stuck inside out. And I thought, this feels really weird. What is going on? I went to the mirror and I saw like a skin tag on the inside of my lower left eyelid, the inner corner, and it was attached just at the margin of my lid. So it was tucked away normally inside of my eyelid. I couldn't even see it, and I just had an eye exam like two months prior. And they, you know, flip your eyelids inside out and nobody had seen anything. So I thought this must have cropped up really suddenly. Well, it's March of 2020, so no one is seeing anyone unless you have COVID or you have a life-threatening condition. So I couldn't get in to see anybody for a couple of months. In May of 2020, I was able to get into my optometrist and they said, well, we think you have a clogged oil duct, so take these medicated drops.
[00:02:54] If it doesn't go away in two weeks, call us, we'll give you some more. I went through two courses of these, and at this point it's growing pretty quickly and it's not responding. So she said, I have to send you to an ocular plastic surgeon that is an ophthalmologist who is trained in reconstruction of the eye. So she said he's going to remove this and send this off to pathology. And it's probably just what they call a papilloma. So I had to wait two months to get into this surgeon. And I was super nervous about this surgery because obviously they're cutting something off of my eyelid. And I thought if I could just get through the local injection, I'll be fine, because that is probably the worst part of it. So he gives me an injection. It's totally fine. I'm like, Oh, perfect. I relax. He just grabs a scalpel and starts cutting away at this thing and I'm in excruciating pain. And I'm saying to him, please stop. I'm not numb enough. This hurts really bad. And I'm basically levitating off of this chair. And he's like, no, no, no, it's fine. Just keep breathing. I'm almost done. He says, all right, so here's a big wad of gauze. Just hold this to your eye for about 10 minutes. I say, do you need to stitch me or cauterize me? This kind of seems unsanitary.
[00:04:09] Nope. Nope. Just hold it there. He comes back 10 minutes later, takes the gauze away. It's completely soaked with blood. Hands me another one. 5 minutes later, miraculously, it had stopped. He said, okay, great. Well, go home and I'll let you know what I hear from pathology. So all of this happened on a Monday in July of 2020. He called me that Friday and he very casually said, Yeah, so I got your pathology back and it is squamous carcinoma, and you're going to have to have your eyelid removed and you'll have that done with someone who does something called Mohs surgery and M-O-H surgery. And then you'll come back to me and I'll put you back together. Wait a minute. Did you just say carcinoma, or are you telling me that I have cancer in my eyelid? Yep. Yep. And, you know, it's Friday, 4:00pm. If you want to go online over the weekend and look at some photos, it's kind of alarming when you see what most surgery is. Don't worry about it. I'll send you a referral to someone that can help you out. Given that it's squamous cell carcinoma, which probably many people have heard of, it is a type of skin cancer. It's generally very locally aggressive but doesn't spread. However, because this was in the conjunctiva of my eye, which is the lining of the eye and also on the eyeball.
[00:05:24] Anyone who has had conjunctivitis or pink eye know what we're talking about because it was there. And that's a very porous surface that is close to the back of the eye in the brain. They treat that more cautiously. And there's MRIs and all sorts of things involved to make sure that that isn't spreading because it can in very rare cases, it can be deadly, but again, very rare. So over the next month, this doctor sent me to see a specialist who didn't know how to help me. I was having trouble finding anyone who could help me. And one day I was like, I wonder if ophthalmological oncology is a thing? And I put that into Google. And sure enough, I found out that ocular oncology is in fact a thing and they treat this type of cancer. It's often cancer of the eye like your actual eyeball or the back of the eye, the orbits of the eye. But the tumor in the front part of the eye and the lid is something that ocular oncologists treat. There are only 300 ocular oncologists in the world and there are none in San Diego, and the closest one was at USC, University of Southern California in LA. So I referred myself to my ocular oncologist there and I didn't get in to see her until the end of August. And that was a month where I completely tormented myself and read everything I possibly could about my condition and the different ways it could be treated so that I could avoid this horrifying surgery.
[00:06:49] Ultimately, she confirmed the diagnosis for our appointment baseline MRI, a lot of other eye scans, something called OCT and said: so it is more than just the part that the doctor removed. It is actually pretty deep around your tear duct, so it's not something that I can treat with just a simple incisional biopsy. The gold standard is to have most surgery to completely cut it out, but that involves removing your lower eyelid. And while that's the gold standard, you won't look like yourself. And if you were 80 years old, I would tell you this is a good idea. But you have a lot of life ahead of you, so I'm not going to recommend that unless you really want to do that. If it were me, I would go with the incisional biopsy and then a monthly injection of something called interferon alpha 2-B, which is an immunotherapy similar to chemo, but not as symptomatic. And it was not an infusion. It was a local injection into that part of my eyelid. And you have the surgery, which we can do in two weeks, and then every month for six months, you come in and get this injection and it would be this four-hour appointment that would be scans and pictures and me examining you in the clinic and then ending with the injection.
[00:08:04] So I went with option B and had this surgery and then after I'd healed eight weeks later, (so we're now in October of 2020) then we went into the monthly injections. And through all of this, this is COVID 19. So I'm going through all of this by myself. My husband came into the first surgery with me, into the pre-op, and then after that, he wasn't allowed in. So we get to February of 2021 and I am now on my last injection. For the final three injections, I started experiencing symptoms. Within 4 hours of the appointment, I would start to get feverish, chills. I would get night sweats. But we went in for the last injection and I had noticed between the one in January and that one in February that something had popped back up in that spot. And I'm sitting in the room waiting for my oncologist to come in and do the final injection. And I hear her on the phone with the radiologist saying, I understand it might be a recurrence. And I thought, ‘oh fuck.’ And she came in and told me we got to do the surgery again. I need to take this out. Whatever has grown, I'm 70% sure that it's scar tissue, but we don't know. So we can do that ten days from now. So eight months of surgeries and treatments was supposed to be a celebration is now. Oh, shit. Great. I have to have another operation.
[00:09:28] So we scheduled that. And on the drive home, I told my husband I'm about to qualify for the vaccine as someone who is going through cancer treatment. And I just feel like for the next couple of weeks, while I wait to go for this surgery, that I want to be really careful with COVID precautions so I can get this vaccine on March 15th in California. And this was February 26. Four days later, my husband tested positive for COVID. There was an outbreak at his gym. He was going to a gym that was mostly outdoors, but had gone back into mostly indoors. And it was a corner CrossFit gym with big garage doors and all the ventilation. Everybody thought that it was safe, but he came home with COVID and I tested negative initially. So we isolated from each other in our home. And then a week later, when I had my pre surgery COVID test, I tested positive. And thankfully we were both very mild cases. But it did push all of this cancer surgery out a month because I needed to be able to test negative before we could operate. And I was pretty pissed off because I also didn't know whether or not my cancer had come back. So now we get into April of 2021. My surgery has been rescheduled from March 10th to April 7th. Over the course of the month between when COVID came on and my surgery, our cat, who was 16 years old, went deeply downhill.
[00:10:55] And on April 5th, we had to make the difficult decision to put him to sleep, which we did at home in a very loving and humane way. But that was two days before I had to go in for this surgery. So I showed up to that surgery on April 7th with really puffy eyes because I'd been doing nothing but sobbing for 48 hours. So I had that surgery and she said, I will send it off to pathology and I'll call you. Two days later she called and she said, the cancer is back. It is really aggressive. It is from what we can see, it's pretty localized. But you're going to have to have the eyelid resection, the surgery we've been trying to avoid. And at this point, I was like, is there someone here in San Diego that can do that surgery? Because we're really tired. Honestly, as wonderful as the care was that she was giving me up at USC, going up to L.A., 2 hours there, 2 hours back every month, me feeling terrible in the car on the way home is kind of a lot. We've been doing it for six, seven months now. And she said, yes: actually, one of the leading plastic surgeons in the world is at University of California San Diego. And he actually trains a lot of the surgeons in the field. So we consulted with him and he showed us photos of similar procedures.
[00:12:12] And I walked out feeling like I kind of wish I'd just done this and not tormented myself for the last how many months, because it looks like it won't be too noticeable if he does it as well as he's done it for everybody else. And at the end of April 2021, I had this pretty radical surgery. It was three and a half hours long. There is a photo on hereformepodcast.com again, if you have the stomach for this sort of thing, but essentially it looks like half of the lower eyelid of my left eye is just gone. It's like a black rectangle, just a chunk taken out. They did the surgery, sent it off to pathology, which is what most surgery is, and then they come back and they say, nope, the margins aren't clean, you need to get more. So they had to go back in one more time. And the pathology said, okay, you seem to have gotten it all. So that was the last piece of that journey. It was a long road getting to that. So a month later it was pretty miraculous. Most people could not believe that I had gone from having a chunk of my eyelid taken out to looking as I did, and I went for my follow up and he said, I am pleased to declare that you are cancer free. And we did get all of it.
[00:13:21] And now I'm at the point where for the rest of my life, probably I will have an MRI at least once a year because we still have to watch and make sure it doesn't come back and that it doesn't appear at the back of my eye or, God forbid, go into any other part of my head.
So what was I feeling while this nightmare unfolded? If you recall, in 2019, with the skin peeling crisis, I was more like, why is this happening now? Bad things happen to good people. Good things happen to bad people. I just don't know why this is happening now when my husband and I are finally starting our life together. This time I was fucking pissed. When I learned that it was cancer, I was so pissed off I couldn't believe I was like, I just endured something rare that made no sense. How is this happening again? Like, literally, can you not choose someone else whose life has been under less upheaval? I couldn't understand why I had to endure another thing in such rapid succession. What made this even more difficult than if I was going through it in non-pandemic times was that no one could get to me. My parents couldn't come and help me. Friends couldn't get to me. We were new to San Diego and we didn't have a support network. I had just started to make friends because I was healed and well enough to put myself out there.
[00:14:54] But I didn't know any of these people well. My husband didn't know his colleagues well enough, nor did he feel comfortable leaning on them. I know that if we asked anybody, they would have dropped anything to help us. But in these times, you want people who know and love you. It's very vulnerable. It was also hard because my husband and I were just starting to learn to live together. After seven and a half years of being long distance, we had never lived under the same roof. Now we're asked to endure a pandemic and be stuck together 24/7. Everybody was dealing with it; for us, we don't even know how to do this in normal times yet. And now I need care. I just had to focus on getting well.
It was first and foremost my health, getting rid of this cancer, getting through this journey, getting through my treatments. My job during the pandemic, I was in communications at Microsoft, had just gone through the roof with how much work we were doing and how stressful it was given the situation in the world. My husband was furloughed from his job for 16 months and had taken a 50% pay cut, and we're grateful that he even has any money coming in at all. But we've had that happen in our financial situation. So I have to keep working. I have great benefits and I need those.
[00:16:08] I also have a great short term disability policy. I was able to take a week off of work every month after my treatment to just get through the symptoms and rest and recover. I had eyedrops that I had to put in four times a day that had to be kept at a certain temperature in the refrigerator. Those are $750 a month. And then taking care of our cat who ultimately passed away, you know, he was quite ill as the same time as I was getting food on the table every night, just taking care of our family and keeping the wheels turning at home. Those things were important for me to focus on and anything else that was happening that might have been not serving me in some way, I just couldn't even register.
So I wanted to spend the summer of 2021 reflecting on what had happened. I felt like I had just come out of the woods. I was at a point where I could see the clearing and I felt like I could sit down and put the sword down for a while and just let everything wash over me and process what had happened and process what I had learned from it and what it meant for how I wanted to move forward in life and what things needed to change, what I needed to do differently. So once I let those visceral emotions wash over and through me, I started to think about the metaphysical aspect of what was happening to me.
[00:17:38] So with my hand, foot and mouth disease, my skin peeling crisis, it was really like, your body is literally sending up fire alarms saying your boundaries are squishy. You're not advocating for yourself. You're not even recognizing that you have needs much less articulating them and expecting that they can be met. So I started reading about the symbolism of the left eye. And as it turns out, some cultures believe and this resonated with me, the left eye is the window to the soul. And I thought, I think my window is murky and I think this is happening to me because I'm not seeing things clearly. And I had a sense that this was a message to open my eyes to what was going on around me and the people and circumstances in my life and really see what isn't serving me. As I mentioned, it was hard to focus on that during this ordeal, which ultimately went on for 15 months. I didn't really have the emotional capacity or frankly, the time to make any big sweeping changes. I was literally in survival mode. So as I reflected on this, I started to see that I was entangled in circumstances in my life that were so toxic I had turned a blind eye, pun intended to them, just to survive. And it was super fucked up. And I saw people in my life that have been encouraging me through their behavior to make myself small, and I've been complicit in it for years.
[00:19:17] So I have people pleasing tendencies which I've mentioned, and a tendency to behave codependently, take on things that aren't mine, and fix messes that aren't mine to fix and rescue people, even if that means putting myself on the back burner, but also making myself small and dimming my light so that other people will not feel that I'm trying to overshadow them. If they put their shit on me, I tend to feel like, let me help you because I can help you. And I would abandon what I needed to do for myself to bail other people out. And all of a sudden I was seeing this very clearly and I was mad at myself for allowing it. It doesn't excuse bad behavior, but you can only control how you show up. The thing is that when you are an empathetic person and you have people-pleasing tendencies and you want to rescue and fix other people, you will be taken advantage of. There are people in the world (and they're not doing it consciously, it's how they've learned to get through life), who essentially target people like this and look for ways to use them as supply so that they can get their needs met at the expense of yours. Again, I'm not excusing bad behavior, but I recognize that I had to change how I was showing up and serving others and not myself.
[00:20:34] It's kind of like somebody who's fair skinned and prone to wicked sunburns. It's not their fault and it's not the sun's fault. It's going to go after whomever is the most vulnerable to its powerful rays. But it's up to the person who is fair skinned to put their sunscreen on. If you're somebody with people-pleasing tendencies, you have to learn to tamper those tendencies and be more judicious in who you surround yourself with. And the therapist that I started seeing in April of 2021, we were looking at things that had happened earlier in life and how they were being triggered by current situations. So I would share with her what was going on in my life at the time, if only to provide context. I told her about the bullying, the belittling, the insults, the ridicule, the temper tantrums that I was experiencing from multiple people in my life and all of these things. I thought, this is my fault. This is something I need to fix. Someone is mad at me. I've done something. My instinct in those situations, because I'm not great with conflict, is to want to take the temperature down right away. What can I do? How can I help? I'm sorry I've pissed you off in some way, and the people that were doing this were very, very good at ensuring that I believed this was my fault. And we all do things to piss people off.
[00:21:52] I certainly bring things to the table that don't work. But these were not those situations, where this is a conflict we have to resolve in a healthy way. The right thing to do in those moments is pause and reflect: what's mine to own? What am I accountable for? What is theirs that is being deflected and is theirs to carry, but now suddenly I'm carrying it. So I share these situations as verbatim as I could with my therapist. And she said to me during one of our sessions, ‘Nicole, I want to tell you something that is going to be difficult to hear. Do I have permission to do so?’ And I said, yes. And she said, ‘What you are describing to me is emotional and verbal abuse. And it's not okay.’ So we don't just need to work on how I'm storing trauma. We needed to work on how to stop the trauma that was happening in my life at this time. And it's very hard to hear this from someone who is skilled making an assessment like this. It's hard to hear someone saying you're being abused. You're not just having a conflict, you're not just people pleasing; someone is actually treating you like complete shit. And particularly in our culture, it's not what strong, smart, successful women are supposed to be going through. I'm sharing this because we need to talk about this. We need to talk about all the forms that it comes in and why our culture conditions women to give selflessly and not step into their power.
[00:23:21] Because of that, they are primed for situations like this. And I want to be really clear that this is not blaming victims. There are certain ways that we show up in the world that make us easy targets. So if you recognize yourself in any of this, and you're wondering, what can I do? Take the time now to reflect on this kind of behavior, how it has showed up in your life. And talk to somebody about why you show up this way and how not to. One woman that you can check out, Robin Clark, a coach who helps women step into their power and claim themselves. She talks about how our good girl training in Western culture, in particular, the one that taught us to put others first, to ignore our needs or pretend we don't have any. We're not worthy of having them met: All of that goes hand in hand with playing small makes us want to acquiesce to keep the peace or avoid confrontation or just feel liked. And we cannot do that. We have to be okay with the chips falling when we speak our truth. When we let other people fall or fail. And recognize that people are spitting venom back at us because they're mad that they have lost power. That's what you want to be able to move towards, to being able to speak your truth, to recognize this behavior.
[00:24:45] Ultimately, these kind of relationships don't serve us. They shouldn't be in our lives. Sometimes just showing up in this way actually shuts it down. A lot of people, they're treating people like this because it's how they function. It's not about you. And once you walk away from it, first, learn to stand up for yourself. But when you walk away from it, they just move on to another supply. So recognizing if you have these tendencies, how do you get ahead of them now before you're in a situation like this?
So once I was able to see more clearly these situations, and my therapist pointed out that I was being emotionally and verbally abused by people in my life. How do I show up differently in the world now? While this was a more painful lesson to learn, it's been an easier one to enforce because this was very fueled by I have been allowing people to treat me like shit. I'm pissed at these people for treating me like shit because fuck them. But also I've been showing up in a way that has made me an easy target. So I started saying hard no's to people. I would literally walk away from situations, so out of the room, out of the building, not responding to an email, hanging up on somebody. My therapist taught me disengagement is the best way to deal with this, and it's very difficult if you're someone, even though I'm not a big conflict person, I am somebody that thinks, oh, we're just not connecting.
[00:26:21] I'm not hearing you and you're not hearing me. So if I just say this in a different way, I think you're just not understanding that does not work with people who are abusing you. You have to completely disengage because what's happening is that they're baiting you because they are doing a couple of things. They're shifting the bullshit for you to carry and they get energy from the fact that you're engaging with them, that you're people pleasing, that you're trying to make them feel better. My therapist used to say, ‘you keep showing up as an emotionally healthy person who is like, oh, I'm just not saying this in the right way or I'm not hearing you properly. Let's try again. That isn't going to work. You literally have to close your mouth and walk out of the room, or at least just close your mouth if you aren't able to walk out of the room.’ So I started doing that. It's really hard at first, but it's amazing how well it works and you get to hold on to your energy because you need it for yourself. You need it to get out of this situation. You need it to get out of this moment, honestly. The other thing I started saying was, ‘you are not allowed to speak to me like this.’ This is a beautiful technique because you're being pushed to engage.
[00:27:26] Again, that bully is getting energy and you can flat out say, I don't accept this energy right now. Back the fuck off. That said, it is a bit of turning the Titanic. When you start this behavior, it feels really uncomfortable and you feel like you're being a bitch and you're not being nice. I still deal with that to this day. Also, the person that you are talking to gets really mad, tries to make you feel guilty, tells you you are selfish. All the ridicule is going to come. It's part of the attempts to get you to play small so that they can keep getting energy from you.
So where am I at with all of this now? As many people do after a cancer journey, I made some big changes to better align my life with my values and live more intentionally. And I credit that summer of 2021 when I was able to reflect on what was happening, see clearly, and think about how to show up differently going forward. After my skin peeling crisis, my shifts were mostly internal about how showing up, and that was certainly the case here as well. I learned how not to dim my own light. But it was also external. There were clearly toxic situations in my life that had to go, and that was part of me choosing myself and stepping into my power. I left my corporate job and I started my own business, which really honors who I am.
[00:28:52] This is my second entrepreneurial journey and I really like working this way. I carefully select my clients and the people that I collaborate with, and I only work with people that I not only respect, but like. When you're self-employed, you get to choose who you work with. It's one of the perks, and I fully embrace it. I cut ties with relationships that were abusive and toxic and harming my health. And when I say relationship, it can be family, friends, people that you work with. I think a lot of times when people hear relationship, they think it's someone's romantic partner or life partner. I say no a lot more. And there's a feeling I get on my body. We talked in another episode about somatic experiencing. I get a weird twinge in my gut when someone is trying to play into my tendency to fix and rescue and to take ownership of things that aren't mine, to play small, to step out of my power. So I tune into that feeling and I quickly run through some questions: What does this person need for me? Does it serve me or them? If it serves them, is this a reciprocal relationship or is it pretty lopsided? Am I feeling pulled to give in? And if so, why? Is it to be liked? Is it to avoid conflict? Is it to keep the peace? And most of all, is this person treating me disrespectfully or abusively? That is a deal breaker right off the bat. Nothing else matters at that point.
[00:30:13] We all have conflict. We get into arguments, things get hotheaded. That is normal. But someone getting in your face, someone ridiculing you, someone calling you names, someone insulting you and mimicking you, or you just feel like they're crushing you and trying to get you to be small. Those are warning signals, and I really see more clearly now how others show up in my life. It's hard to say that bad behavior happens for you because no one deserves it, particularly abusive behavior. And I want to be clear that my life has never been in danger, but I'm grateful to be safe and out of situations that were toxic. I can't say that I am grateful for my cancer journey. I don't know that anyone says they're grateful for their cancer journey, but I'm grateful my eyes were opened and that I see clearly how little I valued myself and allowed those situations to shove me out of my own life. It's a really hard thing to see and feel, but it is of service. I can see so much more clearly now that being an empathetic and caring person is a good thing. It's just about understanding who is worthy of that. And that's something that I will work on for the rest of my life. I talked in another episode about how you don't learn a lesson and you're fixed and you show up differently all the time.
[00:31:33] It's a lifelong journey. I will continue to make progress on that forever. If there's a silver lining to tolerating abusive behavior, and I realize how fucked up that sounds, and I want to emphasize that I don't condone it, but if there's a silver lining to tolerate in that kind of behavior, especially from people you think are supposed to love and support you who are supposed to be collaborating with you and be on your team, it's that when you get to the other side of that, you are Teflon. I think I resisted taking up space, cultivating my passions because I didn't feel that I was worthy. I had such a thin skin because of my people-pleasing tendencies that any criticism would probably have wrecked me. But I have now built up the strength to deflect shade from even people I am close to so I can now deflect it from anyone. When someone criticizes me, I trust myself more. I don't assume they're right from the get-go, which is always been how I would respond to even constructive criticism. I would immediately think, Oh God, I did something wrong. This is my fault. Now I look at what someone is saying, how they're saying that, and why they might be saying it.
I always felt like it was so arrogant to think that someone might be intimidated by me and trying to dim my light.
[00:32:52] I thought, well, who am I? I'm a speck on the earth. You know, nobody's intimidated, but I now know that it is human nature. There are people that are threatened by everything around them, and you have to look at who will benefit from you playing small, who will benefit from you carrying their ship. I'm more discerning now of the people who show up in my life and try to squash me.
If any of this resonates with you. If you recognize yourself in these stories, you have people like this in your life: Have self-compassion. We talked about Kristin Neff’s work. Self-compassion is giving yourself grace. This is heavy shit to deal with. And when you recognize that you are in these situations, don't force yourself to make sudden changes. Something that I didn't always get from people around me was compassion. I had to give that to myself because there were a lot of people that were shaming me; ‘Why would you stay in these situations? This is bullshit. You deserve better.’ And all that does is add to the shame that you already feel when you recognize that this is happening in your life. So: give yourself grace. Give yourself time to get strong. Making changes takes great strength physically and emotionally. For me, I had to get physically well and then I had to work on learning to confront people when they were behaving badly and believing that I was worthy of doing so.
[00:34:43] That takes time. Sometimes a long time, a year, more than a year. But you have to be strong enough because when you walk away from situations like this, the fight that's ahead of you can get ugly. It's hard to find the strength to fight if you're crawling out on your hands and knees.
So as we wrap up this episode, I want to share something that the author, Deborah Copaken, wrote in The Atlantic about her friend, the late, great, amazing writer, director, essayist all around badass woman Nora Ephron. She says that Nora taught her by example how to navigate the post-reproductive half of her life: Gather friends in your home and feed them. Laugh in the face of calamity. Cut out all the things people, jobs, body parts that no longer serve you.
This is what I learned to do. Apparently that included a job, my eyelid, and people who were intent on keeping me small.
Here For Me is produced by Lens Group Media in association with Tulla Productions. My deepest gratitude goes out to the people I am blessed to work with in bringing this show to life. Dave Nelson Stacy Harris, Amy Kugler and Amy Senftleben. If you like what you hear, please follow Here For Me and leave us a review. Until next time. I'm Nicole Christie. Thank you so much for listening. Here's to you being here for you and to the power of choosing yourself.