Chapter 2 – This Autobiography of My Breasts – 2006-2012

Trigger Warning: child sexual abuse

I’m not sure where to begin, or even how much of this story I can put into words. It is hard to imagine that anyone, even if I could adequately articulate my feelings, could understand how I came to have such conflicted feelings about something as simple as having breasts. And yet, it is a story I am compelled to tell; it is a central thread of my identity.  

Except that I never really “had” breasts; it’s more like my breasts had me. Once they “showed up” people started looking at me differently. And treating me differently, and not always in a good way. Most of my life, I hated having breasts. First, because they made me feel awkward and different for not having them, and then for having them. Second, because of the unwanted attention they got me. I blamed them. I hated them. And then … well, let me start at the beginning, or somewhere close to it.

I have not always had breasts. Until puberty. Which was late, by the way, and don’t think that didn’t bother me, either. In Catholic School, when you “start to show” you have to wear a tank top under your uniform blouse, at least, that is, until you are ready for a training bra. I was probably one of the last girls in my class to have to wear either of these articles of clothing. The tank top is always obvious, so you know when “it” is happening to someone else.

Like many things in my house, my parents had never mentioned what I should do when the nuns tell me to need to start wearing a tank top, and that I should probably get a training bra.  I didn’t even know what a training bra was, or what I was training for.  I don’t even think my mother was around at the time. She spent a lot of that year, my 12^th year, in and out of the hospital. And not the kind of hospital where you worry about something bad happening and her not coming home. It was more like the kind of hospital where you are glad she finally went away, and you worry about her coming home too soon.  

So, anyway, she wasn’t around. Not that I had the kind of relationship where I could talk to my mother about anything personal like breasts, because I didn’t. Her mental illness made it difficult for her to really notice anything outside of her own experience. Which left me with my father, which was totally embarrassing. It turns out that Dad didn’t know when a girl needs a training bra, any more than I did, so he had to look at my breasts and try to guess if it was time.  Just for a second. From across the room. But still, yuck!

Fast forward two years.

I am living in a foster home. I am 14 years old. My foster mother’s youngest son, “F”, who is 28 years old, has taken to teasing me in public about the size of my breasts.  He nicknames me “plank” because he says I’m as flat as a board.  His favorite joke is that I got in the “pits” line by mistake, instead of the “tits” line, and asked for seconds. If any of the other adults in his family think this is inappropriate, nobody challenges him on it. He makes this joke a lot in front of his kids, who are 4 and 6 years old, because they and any other kids who happen to be around, think it’s really funny.

I find these comments on my breasts completely humiliating. I become very self-conscious in school, refusing to change in the locker room with the other girls. I hate to be looked at. I take to wearing my very long hair as much in my face as possible to avoid being seen. This habit will eventually earn me the nickname “Cousin It” in high school.

In private, “F” has become obsessed with my body, with my breasts in particular. He says that I am irresistible, and that if I weren’t so irresistible, he wouldn’t have to make me “do stuff” with him. I don’t know what to do. He warns me that if I tell anyone what he is doing to me, he will go to jail. Later on, he changes his threats so that I am not protecting him with my silence, but myself. First, he tells me that noone will believe me; that I will be thrown into the street; in later years, he threatens my life.

His mother suspects that something is happening between us, my 14-year-old self and her adult, married son; she chooses to believe that whatever is happening is my fault. At the same time, she chooses to ignore what is happening. She calls me a whore, even as she pretends not to hear him coming into the house and my room at night. She refuses to let any social worker or doctor interview me privately; she lies to them about my eating habits and symptoms, even during my senior year in high school as we explore possible physical causes for fainting spells.  The night before the annual hearing to evaluate my placement in her home, she threatens to have me thrown out, but during the hearing she praises me as a well-behaved and lovable child. I am so grateful that she is not abandoning me, that I say nothing when the judge asks me if there are any reasons why I should not continue living with her. I am confused and afraid and powerless.

From the minute “F” started molesting me, I stopped eating. What was happening to me, and my inability to talk about it, made me sick to my stomach. Nobody seemed to notice. But my breasts stopped growing, which was all right with me. I hated my woman’s body, in particular my breasts, and I would have done anything to be rid of them once and for all. These choices, not to eat, not to become a woman, they were not conscious choices. They seemed to be happening to me spontaneously, rather than involving any sort of internal decision process. Even as doctors were evaluating me for brain tumors because they could not locate a reason for my fainting spells, even as they were asking if I was eating, I could not connect these health problems with my starvation. I just didn’t see how one thing was related to the other.

This was the beginning of my anorexia. Years later, when people started talking about anorexia in the media, they said it was the affliction of young women who were perfectionists and who struggled with unreasonably high expectations of themselves. I did not recognize myself in that description, even though I weighed only 100 pounds at 5 feet 8 inches. I did not see myself as a perfectionist, although I recognize that in myself today. Back then, all I knew was that I hated having a woman’s body. And not because I thought I was supposed to be a man.  I hated my body for the attention it got me. And I hated my breasts because they were the focal point of all that unwanted attention. 

For years after the abuse, which lasted until I was 18, I was numb from my neck to my knees, literally. I would allow men to be intimate with me, but I would not feel anything during those physical acts of intimacy. I learned how to fake emotions and physical reactions because otherwise people got upset that I was not “enjoying” myself. I could only have sex if I was drunk or stoned. I selected for partners people who were so self-involved they didn’t even notice that I would dissociate during sex.

When I came out as a lesbian at 22, I wasn’t really sure how to deal with other women’s breasts, either. For a long time, I was unable to understand how any woman could derive pleasure from her breasts or tolerate anybody, especially me, paying attention to them. It was difficult to relate to women sexually, because it seemed like I was aligning myself with “F”. I had trouble seeing women, myself, my lovers, as other than victims of their sexual experiences. I could not have put this into words back then; even now, it is difficult to explain.  

I finally began addressing my eating disorder and putting on weight in my mid-20s. I was no longer able to pretend that I did not have a woman’s body. I started to fill out. My breasts were one of the first areas where my weight became apparent. I almost immediately developed fibrocystic breast syndrome, which involves the development of painful cysts during certain points in your menstrual cycle. So now I not only had to live with my breasts, but they caused my physical pain as well. I hated them even more.

This was all very distressing to me, and it took years of therapy to begin to come to peace with my new body; I still work on this today. In Alcoholics Anonymous we have a saying “I don’t have to like something to accept it, but I must accept it.” This attitude worked for me when I had to face difficulties in life, and it worked for me in terms of accepting that I had breasts. My body, once I started nourishing it adequately and accepting its existence, began to lose that numbness that I had lived with for so long. I began to feel my relationships with other people, in ways that I never had before. This was both a blessing and curse. But a few more years in therapy, and it became less of a curse… more of a blessing... it took a while.

My mother was diagnosed with her breast cancer when I was 28. And even though I knew this meant that I had a higher risk for breast cancer myself, I ignored it. When my gynecologist said that I didn’t need mammograms before 40, I chose to believe her, even though I heard different opinions in the media and from friends.

In the summer of 2002, the radiologist found that suspicious area in my left breast and referred me to Dr. G. Before I knew it, I was getting a stereotactic breast core needle biopsy.[1] Within days, I was diagnosed with a precancerous condition called atypical intraductal hyperplasia. [2] A few weeks later, Dr. G performed an excisional or surgical biopsy to remove the precancerous area, and the pathologist found a small malignant tumor inside that precancerous tissue.  

I was diagnosed with ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS) – breast cancer that had not yet escaped the duct, or Stage 0 breast cancer. This made perfect sense to me. All of my bitterness and resentment about the sexual abuse lived in my breasts; I had blamed them all my life for that abuse. It seemed like the perfect way for them to get back at me for rejecting them all those years. Clearly, I still had work to do.

A friend recommended that I read Bernie Siegel’s book Love, Medicine & Miracles.  Siegel writes about needing to live an authentic life, to love your body, to think of your body and mind as one being. Your life is stored in your body. If you have cancer in your body, you need to focus your love on the part of your body where that cancer lives.

Great!  Now I had to love my breasts.  Accepting their existence was not enough.  And now, when suddenly faced with the possibility of losing them, I didn’t want to.  Whether or not I ever liked those years of inappropriate and painful attention, my breasts had woven themselves into my identity as a woman.  The idea of having them removed was very anxiety-provoking.  I would do it if I had to, and I knew that it was survivable, but I was terrified by the possibility.

I was fortunate. The cancer was very early and had not spread beyond the duct. This meant that I could survive with a lumpectomy and radiation. Siegel also writes in his book about visualizing God’s love as a healing light, shining on the cancerous area. This was my daily visualization during radiation therapy. Rather than focusing on the humiliation of being laid bare on that table, and the pain the radiation caused, I imagined that the radiation was white light, the love of God, shining down on my breast. I know it sounds weird, but that’s what I did.  

It worked. The radiation did anyway, because [at the time I originally wrote this essay] I remained cancer free for four years. The visualization worked, too, I think. The love that I practiced feeling for my breasts helped me in my recovery from the treatment. It’s a struggle, after being treated for breast cancer.  First, there are the months it takes for the tissue in the affected breast to heal, from the surgeries, from the radiation, from the experience of having such a private part of your body being poked and prodded by medical professional after medical professional, day after day. Suddenly, that part of you is this impersonal thing, a site of disease or cure. It’s hard to incorporate it back into the rest of your body, into your intimate relationship with your partner, or to look at that part of your body in the mirror and see anything other than the scar or the fear. You have to want all of your body to exist as one; there is no room for hating any of it.

Somehow, though, the afflicted part of your body becomes one with the rest of you again.  The disease has been cut out, burned out of it. I finally forgave my breasts. I could see that they were just the excuse that he used to justify his violation of me, and I accepted them as part of this womanly body that is me.

************

I originally wrote this essay in the fall of 2006, four years after my first breast cancer diagnosis. In 2007, I was diagnosed with Stage 1 invasive breast cancer, again in my left breast, and it is that experience that I will be writing about for the remainder of this book. Prior to this new diagnosis, I thought I had completely forgiven my breasts for their part in the sexual abuse. When I received this second diagnosis, I was faced once again with my anger at my abuser and with the need to forgive my breasts for being the focus of his interest in me.  

Because I had already received radiation therapy, I could not receive radiation again, and so my only option was a mastectomy. I had already had one biopsy of my right breast, which was benign, but I did not want to worry about finding cancer in the future, so I decided to have a bilateral mastectomy. I also opted for reconstructive surgery. After all of the work I have done to accept my breasts, I found them integral to my identity as a woman and could not imagine a life without them. As it turns out, reconstruction did not restore me to anything like my original body, but I will go into that later in the book.

My bilateral mastectomy gave me a chance to excise my abuser from my body once and for all. And although I felt more liberated from him than ever, I found myself faced with entirely new challenges around body image and sexuality. Perhaps these issues are universal for women undergoing breast reconstruction, or perhaps they are intensified for me because of my history of eating disorders or sexual abuse. Whichever is true, and as difficult as this journey may be, I face it with confidence that my body is free of cancer, and free of the stains of sexual abuse.

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[1] A core needle biopsy is a “through the skin" (percutaneous) procedure that involves removing small samples of breast tissue using a hollow "core" needle. For lumps or lesions that can be felt by hand, this is accomplished by fixing the lesion with one hand and performing a freehand needle biopsy with the other. In the case of non-palpable lesions (those unable to be felt), stereotactic (computer-guided) mammography or ultrasound image guidance is used. Stereotactic mammography uses computers to pinpoint the exact location of a breast mass based on mammograms taken from two different angles. The computer coordinates help the physician to guide the needle to the correct area in the breast. With ultrasound, the radiologist or surgeon watches the needle on the ultrasound monitor to help guide it to the area of concern.  The needle used during core needle biopsy is larger than the needle used with fine needle aspirations (usually done in your doctor’s office), and has a special cutting edge. 

[2] Atypical hyperplasia is caused by a disruption in normal cell growth in breast tissue, which causes an over-production of normal-looking cells that accumulate and begin to look abnormal.  These cells can develop into ductal carcinoma in situ, or noninvasive breast cancer in the milk duct.  This can develop into invasive cancer, which can invade the surrounding breast tissue, lymph channels or blood vessels (Mayo Clinic). 

Chapter 1: Mom

**Copyright 2022 Maria Teresa Brown - All Rights Reserved**

Part 1: The First Go-Round (or Ductal Carcinoma In Situ)

Chapter 1: Mom

I will start my story by telling you that I am not the only woman in my family who has had breast cancer.  While neither of my grandmothers had it, as far as I know, or any of my aunts, my mother did. It was found during a routine mammogram, and she had a complete mastectomy on that side, but no other treatment. After the mastectomy, she wore a prosthetic or not, depending on her preference on any given day. Her cancer was found when she was 63, and she remained cancer-free until her death at 81. 

At the time of her diagnosis and mastectomy, I was in my late 20s.  I had been sober for a few years, but was still a heavy smoker. Around that time, I knew of a women in my local community who had breast cancer and was a heavy smoker – she had a mastectomy, kept smoking, got metastatic[1] breast cancer, kept smoking, and then she died. All within a few years.  It seemed really fast and frightening to me. All I could think about when I heard my Mom’s diagnosis was that now that breast cancer was officially “in my family” I didn’t want to be dealing with having breast cancer and trying to quit smoking or being unable to quit smoking and dying from cancer because of it. That was the year that I began making my first serious attempts at quitting smoking.  It took several years and multiple failed attempts, but I did finally quit smoking for good the year that I turned 32. 

Now, I don’t know for sure if cigarette smoking has ever been proven to cause breast cancer, but if your mother, a heavy smoker, had any kind of cancer, you would probably find yourself wondering if her smoking had anything to do with it. In my mother’s case, she did not quit smoking. Ultimately, she developed COPD, and her official cause of death was “complications of COPD.” Mom’s smoking was not something I could change. But I could change my own habits, and so I focused on that. And one of the first things I thought the first time I was diagnosed with breast cancer was “thank God I quit smoking when I did!” 

Since my first diagnosis, alcohol abuse has also been linked with breast cancer.  As I mentioned before, I was already sober a few years when Mom had her mastectomy, and I was sober 12 years when I had my first breast cancer. My doctors have always been confident that my history of alcoholic drinking was distant enough not to be linked to my breast cancer. I am not as confident, but I am certainly grateful that I was not still drinking when I was diagnosed. Because the only thing that was harder than quitting smoking for me was quitting drinking. And I would definitely have been told to do both once I had breast cancer. Whether I would have been able to, though, is highly unlikely. 

This chapter is about Mom, not just because of her history as a smoker and a breast cancer survivor, but because of my role as her caregiver throughout the years that I was dealing with facing and surviving breast cancer.

I was diagnosed with my first breast cancer in August of 2002. I had already spent pretty much every day of that summer at the hospital, trying to figure out what was happening to my mother.  That spring, she had been moved out of the apartment she shared with Dad into a homeless shelter for mentally ill women, and eventually into her own apartment in an enriched housing program.  Her enriched housing program was essentially independent living for older or disabled adults who qualifid for Social Security Disability, Medicaid, and public housing. It was not a good transition. She was very unhappy, and her health was bad. While she had lived with bipolar disorder all of her life, she was additionally depressed about being separated from Dad, but he just didn’t want to, or couldn’t, take care of her anymore.  She also started getting really forgetful.  More than I even realized at the time.  Nobody was aware of it, but she was experiencing a medical condition – hyperparathyroidism – that was causing all the calcium in her bones to leak out into her blood. This caused hypercalcemia, which caused the memory loss and started making her fall. The worst fall broke 2 vertebrae in her back and split her head open, landing her in the ER. They discharged her back to her apartment that day, which felt unsafe to me, but I didn’t know what else to do. A week later, she was completely incapacitated and had lost most of her ability to speak. She was back to the ER, and this time admitted into the hospital. Within a week, and before they could figure out what was going wrong, she ended up spending 20 hours in a coma. She survived the coma but was what they called “severely demented” for weeks afterwards. When she was well enough, they discharged her to a nursing home. And she lived in nursing homes for the rest of her life. Her dementia became less severe after that initial hospital stay, but she never recovered her short-term memory or her capacity to take care of herself well enough to live outside of a nursing home.

In the middle of Mom going through all of that, I went to the gynecologist for an annual exam.  I had been living in Syracuse with my partner for a year and a half and had not been to the gynecologist since before I moved. Which meant I was overdue for an annual exam. I hated going to the gynecologist, mostly because it is an unpleasant experience for any of us, but also because of repeated questions about birth control (no matter how many times I told them I didn’t have sex with men, they just kept asking those questions!) and my history as a sexual abuse survivor.  So I had been putting off my first visit to MG’s gynecologist.  Eventually, her mother told her to just make the appointment for me if I wouldn’t do it myself.  The best advice ever, it turns out.  MG made me the appointment for that July, and so like a good girlfriend, I went.  The gynecologist’s office was in the same building as an imaging office, so she sent me right over for my baseline mammogram.

I was only 36, and since Mom’s breast cancer a few years earlier, the former gynecologist had told me I didn’t need a mammogram until I turned 40, because Mom’s cancer was post-menopausal. But MG’s Mom, and their gynecologist, believed in early baseline mammograms, so that you have images to compare to when you start your regular mammograms at age 40. This is why I was sent over to imaging for a mammogram.  The physical examination of my breasts was totally normal.

The events of that afternoon are not entirely clear anymore, it was so long ago.  I know they wanted a magnification of my left breast, because the radiologist wanted to take a closer look at it. Which means that I had to have extra mammograms done on that side. And I know that the area they were concerned about was very close to my armpit, so they really had to pinch my breast in the machine, which hurt. After the second image, the technician sent me back to my gynecologist, who told me that there was a suspicious area in my left breast and they needed to refer me to a breast surgeon.  Before I left their office, I had an appointment with Dr. G, who ended up being my breast surgeon for both breast cancers. 

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[1] Metastatic breast cancer is when the cancer has spread to other parts of your body (like your liver, brain, or bones) or comes back (recurs) after you have complete treatment for the initial cancer. Some people might call it systemic cancer, or stage four cancer, or end stage cancer. At this point, the cancer is not curable, although depending on the particular details of an individual case, it may be manageable with the appropriate treatments, and some women have been known to live for many years with metastatic breast cancer.

My Breast Cancer, My Mother, My Wife, and Me: One Lesbian’s Breast Cancer Journey

I've decided to use this blog to share my breast cancer memoir, which I hope to self-publish. The title of this post is one of the titles I'm considering. Please tell me what you think of it in the comments.

Lesbians, and other members of the LGBTQIA+ community, are essentially invisible in mainstream breast cancer literature.  Mainstream books written to guide breast cancer survivors through recovery from treatment are written with an unacknowledged assumption that all survivors are cisgender heterosexual women, and the authors of commonly available cancer memoirs are cisgender heterosexual women. While lesbians may still find useful information in literature written from and for the heterosexual survivor’s perspective, their invisibility in these written accounts of cancer and recovery experiences effectively communicates that their cancer experiences are unimportant. Many lesbians may see these heterosexist assumptions as barriers to seeking the help and support they need during one of the most difficult times of their life. Because lesbians with cancer may not have a community of other lesbians with cancer around them, and cannot find themselves in the cancer literature, cancer can be a very isolating experience. They may hunger for information from other lesbians who are going through the same experience.

I was diagnosed with my first breast cancer less than ten years after my mother survived her own breast cancer. As a survivor of two breast cancers (DCIS in 2002 and Stage I in 2007), I have been through multiple lumpectomies, radiation therapy, a bilateral mastectomy with reconstruction, chemotherapy, and a hysterectomy. In addition to being relatively young for each of these cancers, 36 and 42 respectively, I am also a lesbian.  I was fortunate in that, at the time of my first diagnosis, I personally knew two other lesbians who had also been through breast cancer. I quickly realized, however, that all of the support resources offered by local and national breast cancer organizations assumed that all patients are heterosexual, and that at fundraising events in my area, it was assumed that we were all heterosexual. If I wanted a community of lesbian cancer survivors, I would have to create that community. In 2008, I created a Facebook group for lesbians with cancer and their partners. Our membership currently numbers 321 lesbian, bisexual, and gender non-binary patients, survivors, and partners or caregivers from around the United States and the world. Publishing this cancer memoir is another step in providing lesbian cancer patients and survivors some sense of community with other lesbian cancer survivors.

I tell my cancer story using a combination of narrative text, email messages, private journal entries, blog entries, and messages from family members and friends.  Throughout my cancer experience, I have made sure my sexual orientation and my relationship with my wife were visible to healthcare providers, and my wife has been an active partner in all of my treatment decisions and in my relationships with my healthcare providers. While I have always had to be intentional about that visibility, and sometimes had to risk that visibility in uncertain environments, I have been very lucky in terms of providers being respectful of me and of us. This is an important point for those lesbians who may be putting off preventive screenings for fear of discrimination and homophobia in healthcare settings.  While these negative experiences do sometimes happen, they are not inevitable. Depending on where you go for treatment, you may find providers who are more accepting than you expect. In this context, my memoir also communicates the importance of being proactive in terms of regular healthcare and cancer screenings, and provides a list of available resources for lesbians and their partners facing cancer.

Ruminations of Ithaca, August 2022

Sometimes you forget how Ithaca feels until you haven’t been here in a while. You forget how it feels to be here - like the fact that in the summertime  everything smells really good. People have so many flowers -  their whole front yard and the grass between the curb and the sidewalk are full flower gardens -  wildflowers, unbelievable smelling neighborhoods. 

You forget how many trees there really are here. And those trees have changed so much since the last time you were here. Every house you walk by reminds you of someone you used to know who lived in it. When I used to live here it felt like some people lived in the same rental the whole time I knew them, but in retrospect it may be because I didn’t really know them very long. Whereas other people, like me, moved all the time. Sometimes 2 or 3 times a year. 

You never knew where I was unless you knew someone who knew me. Here are just a few of the houses I lived in.

  

Some of these houses look like they haven’t changed since the last time I was here, and some look like they haven’t changed since I lived here 22 years ago.  

Houses that used to be glorious are run down and haven’t been painted in a while, or have random boards holding up the columns on the porches. Every place seems a little run down compared to what it looked like 22 years ago, except for the apartment building at 501 Tioga. It’s newly painted and fresh looking, and it used to be tenement housing in the 90s. Most properties are rentals, and you can tell which ones are rented and which are owner-occupied by how run-down they are.

Things have changed but things have not changed and I’m liking that. Actually, it’s nice to see things that remind me of old times and in between them things that I have no recollection of whatsoever. Like the two tiny houses on Auburn Street that were built in the side yards of other houses.   

The other thing you forget about Ithaca when you’re not here for a while is that almost everybody has a dog. They take their dogs everywhere and everybody will talk to you about their dog, whether they know you or not. Like one dog was sniffing me and I was holding my hands behind my back, and the owner said I could just pet him if I wanted. I said oh I know that’s probably true but no one can pet my dog, so I don’t test other people‘s dogs by petting them. She laughed, I said goodbye and walked away. She turned around and shouted “he approved of you, you know! The dog approved of you!” I thought that was really sweet, although how can you tell? The dog just sniffed me, that was it! 

Or another guy in the intersection had a golden retriever, and the dog’s face was just so open and friendly and happy, so I said “your dog has a great face”, and he said “oh thank you!” like it was the best complement you could pay him. But the dog DID have a great face. That’s the kind of thing you can say to complete strangers in Ithaca.  I probably wouldn’t do that walking around Syracuse. Maybe in the University neighborhood or on my own street, but that’s about it. In Ithaca everywhere is the University neighborhood, I guess that’s a difference.  

When I saw Tom Holton today at the farmers market, he recognized me right away, even with my mask on. He just saw my eyes and he knew it was me, whereas I knew it was him because he was in the same stall he and his wife have been running at the farmers market since they got married, like, 29 years ago. But I haven’t seen anyone else yet that I recognize. I see people that could be people I might know, but that pretty much counts everybody. In Ithaca looks like someone you might know, but you also know that most people rotate out of here after a few years, so it could be that nobody here is anybody I know! it’s an odd cultural thing that happens here, this rotating citizenry with the University cycles.

The other thing that always changes here is that businesses keep moving in Ithaca, so things that you assume will be here are not here. For example, there was a Gimme Coffee on State Street last time I was here, next to a lesbian bar, but no such thing exists now. Or the new business that took over the old women’s bookstore building. Or the fact that a number of the residential houses on Green Street appear to be businesses now, and vice versa. So the house I used to live in on Green Street is unrecognizable to me – could be it’s been torn down, or  maybe they painted it, or maybe it’s so rundown I don’t recognize it.

They are also really dedicated to renewable energy in Ithaca, like this one building that has 30 solar panels on it just because it can.

Things that make you FEEL like a failure, but don't MAKE you a failure...

We all develop at our own pace. This list echoes the concerns of so many young adults, however, who feel like they are failing relative to society's expectations or what they see their peers accomplishing. Set aside for a moment the truth that we should not compare our insides to other people's outsides because we have no way of knowing what they are really going through.

Things that don't make you a failure (Reddit user u/qevo):

• Ending a relationship
• Admitting you need help
• Not owning your own house
• Having a different timeline than others
• Not being married by 30 or 40 or 50
• Taking longer to reach your goals
• Taking a break from a stressful life
• Feeling like you're behind
• Not having your dream job
• Not wanting the same things as everyone else

Many of the achievements referenced in this list assume that we all develop at the same pace - owning your own house, being married by a certain age, etc. While other items that can be construed as indicators of failure - taking longer to reach your goals, having a different timeline, feeling like you're behind - are based on preconceived notions of what development is supposed to look like. But existing models of development may be based on outdated notions, or may be ignorant of the role of trauma.

I remember taking a human development course in graduate school and learning what the developmental tasks were for each decade of adulthood, according to Erik Erikson's stages of psychosocial development. 

I was 37 at the time, and I realized that up to that point, I had consistently been a decade behind where Erikson said I should be. Now, keep in mind that his stages were developed in the 1930s, and our lives were moving at a different pace 70 years later. But also, I think childhood trauma can create delays according to this model, because Erikson's theory leaves no room for recovery from childhood trauma. 

Adverse Childhood Experiences

Exposure to more ACEs leads to higher risk of behavioral and health problems later in life, like:

• smoking
• alcoholism
• lack of physical activity
• depression
• diabetes
• cancer

Those are just the risk factors I have seen realized in my own life. I think ACEs can also distract a person - to put it mildly - from their own psychosocial development. 

For example, I scored a 7 out of 10 on the ACEs quiz. I went on to develop an eating disorder, alcoholism, and a penchant for dysfunctional and abusive relationships, by late adolescence, during the time when I was supposed to have been navigating the "identity vs role confusion" stage. 

Which meant I spent my 20s figuring out "identity vs role confusion" when your typical 20 year old was supposedly figuring out "intimacy vs isolation." I didn't get to intimacy vs isolation until my 30s. Luckily, I didn't meet my wife until my mid-30s. By then, my psychosocial development was picking up the pace, so by my 40s I was on track. 

Realizing this explained SO much of my struggles during my 20s and 30s, you have no idea.

All of which meant that at any time in my 20s or 30s, I could check off almost every item in our original list of things that can make a person feel like a failure. Which could not be further from what I really was back then or what I really am today.

The moral of our story, then, is that we should not judge ourselves too harshly, or anyone else for that matter, because our biography exerts as much or more influence on our development as society's expectations. And the clue to determining our success lies in that biography.