Today is my 35th birthday and I’m thinking about my body. How’s it endured for me and carried all manner of pain, but also how often I’ve ignored it. Taken it’s annoying but manageable chronic illnesses for granted. 35 is an age, like many before it, that I didn’t think I’d ever reach.

I spent a long time thinking of ways to end my life between the ages of 12 and my late 20s. The sludgy mire of depression coupled with its sibling apathy meant nothing ever came of it beyond a thudding, perpetual, mental anguish dotted with moments of indifferent calm. Within the past 6-7 years, my chronic depression has abated and allowed me access to happiness in a way I can only remember feeling in my early childhood. And it’s only within the last 2 years that I’ve made choices in my life to live in a way more aligned to my own beliefs and desires, to pragmatically move towards that happiness.

When I discovered my pancreatic tumor last year, it was during a time where I’d felt the most eager to live, a feeling so new and precious to me that the sudden threat to it smothered me in familiar darkness. I would read studies, Reddit forums, and articles about the diagnosis: “…pancreatic cancer remains the third-leading cause of cancer-related deaths in the United States… the five-year survival rate for pancreatic cancer is 13%…painful…incurable…” It is a horrific disease. I remember my partner driving me home from the ER after we first discovered it (by accident!) and thinking ‘Wow, I just found the person I’m supposed to be with and now I’m going to leave them behind!’ The weighty cruelty and indifference of existence astounded me in deep way, a sensation I’ve been lucky to only feel a few times in life.

I started thinking about what I would do if I only had 1 or 2 years left to me and it felt like a cold knife was slipping into my chest. Just when I felt I was taking my life into my own hands, building a future with someone I loved, and living according to my own ideals, it was going to be taken away. And not by any person but my own body. Myself. It felt serendipitously evil, as if my body was taking revenge on me for all the harm I’d done to it, all the sadness it had been forced to house over the decades. It couldn’t stomach the change from long-term, plodding hopelessness to the sudden rush of joyful possibility.

It is hard to give anything honor that isn’t divine. As someone raised in a strict religion, humility and the active diminishment of one’s importance and value was a big element of my upbringing. We were servants of God and not even necessary ones. The body was just a living sacrifice. A sacrifice we were lucky to offer. Neither was there any celebration in this religion. No holidays, no birthdays, only solemn observations. If any festivities snuck into my life it was by accident and rare. Attempting to internalize some level of honor and celebration, of feeling my body’s importance, my own importance and value, feels like an act impossible to engage with genuinely. It is counter to all I know. But though I can’t access it yet, I want to try. To think about my body’s specialness and at the very least, give it the dignity of my attention.

In the end, the timing of my tumor’s discovery was incidental even if it felt fatalistic. The tumor could have been growing for years or months, no one knew with these species of growths. It was my good fortune I got it out when I did even if it felt like a death sentence. My body came through for me in ways I couldn’t have imagined. I starved and dehydrated it over and over. The acid from vomiting so much burned the backs of my gums and changed the texture of my teeth. It was needled what felt like hundreds of time, cut up, and stitched it back together. It weathered deep, fearful sadness and persisted through fragility I couldn’t escape. Even with the comprehensive daily care for months from my family and partner, it was a struggle.

Today, my body is strong. My doctor tells me the trajectory of my recovery is that of an ideal patient which shocked me. I felt like I clawed through it so slowly. My partner reminded me all the time of how much I was enduring, how strong I was being, but I didn’t emotionally connect to those facts until now. I went through some shit and I came out the other side better! I can’t help but feel the need to honor my body, to call out its specialness. By separating my body from myself—a useful habit since childhood—, it makes it easier to give it praise.

I lotion the 8 inch scar down my stomach, the smaller incision scars where laparoscopy tools and rubber drains were threaded inside. The line of scar tissue is taut and tugs at the fascia and muscle beneath, firm and knitted. At my lowest weight, I was grayed and dry and saggy, my suddenly devoured muscle causing all my joints to hurt. Now I’ve gotten some fat and muscle back and being at rest in my body doesn’t produce a constant ache. I can lift my wiener dogs up with tiring myself out for the day. I don’t flinch at my dogs playing around me, terrified they’re going to pull my drains loose from the incisions. I feel almost completely at home in my body again and grateful for everything I can do. Feeling the threat of its absence so vividly has left me desperate to do more with my body more than ever. Adorn it, feed it, appreciate it.

I want to keep making things in my life special. It’s hard to create the sacred from scratch. It feels egotistical and false. I easily find specialness and the sacred in people I love, in art or books or film, but when I think about creating it for myself, around myself, I face a wall. Even my own art that I consider of merit doesn’t hold that quality to me. The process of always creating does but it is disconnected from me, within the domain of the Muse. But I’m alive and I’m living, truly living. There’s little else more miraculous than that.

I think, like most things, practice is necessary. I imagine coming from the type of orthodoxy I was raised in, where belief came first, I need to approach it from an orthopraxic perspective. Ritual. Action. Meditation. To build a tangible practice of attention and dignity around what I want to honor. Little by little, I’ll offer my gratitude to the toughest and most fragile parts of me. The insignificant and the crucial. To close the gap between myself and what is sacred, like two sides of a wound meeting to seal a tender opening.