Same hands. Same car. Completely different drive.
From the Sunday Self-Care Chronicles | 6/21/26
Hey there friend.
Happy summer solstice! It's the longest day of the year. And I'll be honest, it snuck up on me completely.
In Buffalo, I usually feel the solstice coming. Spring drags there — fighting with winter all through April and often well into May — and the slow crawl toward this longest day typically has a kind of momentum to it. A building that feels like anticipation and hope of all summer offers.
But this year I was in Italy for all of that, where it was already warm and summery and the light was already generous, and so one week back in the Northeast and the solstice just… arrived. No runway or buildup. Just here we are, at the peak of day light.
And now, after today, the days begin getting shorter, the light begins to recede in favor of the dark. But I don't think it's something to feel sad about or wish away. I think it's just another turning point to reflect on.
I've been thinking about pivots and turning points all week, actually — because of a much more ordinary moment that happened the day after Dathan and I got home.
I had to drive.
In Italy, I was a passenger. Dathan drove everywhere we went over there (Italian roads being what they are — and him being, inexplicably, completely unintimidated by it), and when we weren't in a car we were walking, wandering through towns where cars weren't really the point (and often not allowed).
I spent ten weeks looking out windows — trying to memorize the sweep of the hills, the greens and golds of the fields, the particular shape of the dark cedar trees that line so many driveways there. I wasn't even navigating thanks to the rental car's built in GPS.
I was just… riding and receiving.
So when I hopped in the car with a couple of errands planned, it shouldn't have been any big deal. My hands and feet knew exactly what to do and I knew where I was going. But my brain had to come back to the task in a way it hasn't in years.
I found myself concentrating on the cars in front of me and behind me, paying extra attention to the lights, to the distance between me and the car in the next lane, because the autopilot I've earned through decades of driving wasn't kicking in.
I realized, driving my own car around the familiar streets of my own city, that I hadn't wanted to come back to the task. That I'd wanted to keep being a passenger a little longer.
Not because I couldn't drive — clearly I could — but because being driven had felt like such a specific kind of care. Of ease. Of permission to let someone else carry that particular thing for a while.
Here's where it gets interesting, though.
The last time I went a stretch that long without driving was after my double mastectomy.
My surgeon kept me off the road for more than six weeks — longer than most, because of how my implant surgery was done — and I remember those weeks feeling almost like a kind of claustrophobia. I wanted the wheel back desperately.
I was afraid, yes — afraid of the seatbelt rubbing against my new, tender breasts, afraid of stopping short and having it press hard into my chest, afraid of others on the road and what I couldn't control — but I was also so ready.
Ready to be the one in charge of something again. Ready to get myself somewhere under my own power. Ready to prove to myself that my body could still do the thing, that cancer hadn't taken this one too.
I remember that first drive. The tenderness turned out to be manageable. My nerves loosened the more miles I put behind me. How quickly driving started to feel like mine again — natural, automatic, easy — as though it had never been interrupted at all.
Same action. Completely different meaning.
Then, driving was about getting myself back. This time, not driving was about being given something — and having to give it back.
The meaning of things in survivorship is not fixed. It just isn't.
What felt like limitation at one point in your experience might feel like gift at another. What felt like freedom might, under different circumstances, feel like obligation.
It might be the same body, the same action, the same ordinary human task — and yet the story you're inside when it arrives changes everything about what it means.
This is hard to hold onto when you're in the early days of it — when everything feels like loss, when every limitation feels like evidence of what cancer took. I know. I've been there.
But I also know that those meanings shift, sometimes completely, sometimes more than once.
The body you're trying to get back to might turn out to be a body you've never had before — more capable in some ways, more patient, more willing to be carried for a while.
It's the longest day of the year today, and I'm at our family cottage looking out at the lake, and now that the rain has passed, the light is extraordinary.
And yes — tomorrow it starts to recede. That's just how it goes. The peak is also the turning point; the fullest moment is also the beginning of the shift.
It's just the nature of things, cycling through as they always have, meaning something a little different each time they arrive.
I hope wherever you are today, you're getting a little of this light. And I hope you're comfortable with which seat is yours right now.
Until next week, I'm always in this with you.
P.S. The driving metaphor has me curious about where you are right now in your survivorship — are you in the driver's seat, ready to take the wheel? Or are you still needing to be a passenger for a while, to let someone else carry things? Hit reply and tell me. I'd genuinely love to know.