Nobody Gets a Bubble.
From the Sunday Self-Care Chronicles | 6/7/26
Happy Sunday, dear one.
I think many of us carry around a delusional little fantasy that, given the right timing and circumstances, when we need to we can put ourselves in a bubble.
You know the one. The bubble called “someday” where you finally get to focus on the one thing — the project, the hobby, the healing, the rest you keep promising yourself — without anything else clamoring for a piece of you or any unexpected challenges interrupting your focus.
We tell ourselves that if we can just carve out the time and the space, we'll get it done. We'll be better at it. We'll be different.
And it would be lovely, wouldn't it? To inflate that bubble around us and float away like Glinda the Good until we decide that we're ready to reenter the world, accomplished and complete?
But here's the trouble with bubbles — even if you somehow manage to build one, it usually pops the moment the first sharp object comes along.
And the sharp objects always come along.
I've had a front-row seat to this for the last couple of months.
While we've been away in Italy, life back home did not get the memo that we weren't available for its antics. Even across an entire ocean our dreamy bubble of living and working abroad felt the pokes of real life.
A shower valve gave out and sent water pouring through the ceiling and into our kitchen (much to the horror of my brother in law who walked in to find it) which meant that, from several thousand miles away, we were suddenly coordinating plumbers and insurance adjusters and contractors.
For a number of days we genuinely wondered whether we'd have to cut the trip short. But thanks to our wonderful family members who stepped up to manage all of the necessary comings and goings, we were able to stay (because we are luckier than we have any right to be).
And that was just the dramatic one.
The mundane stuff has caused its own mischief here just like it can at home.
There have been many days I'd planned to get real work done and simply didn't have the energy orgot knocked out by a headache.
On a couple of days I had all the motivation and the energy, the hotel wifi wasn't strong enough to meet my needs — or, most recently and interestingly, the internet went down for the entire town during our stay.
And throughout our trip I've been carrying the news that a family member is very, very sick, and there has been nothing I could do but worry about them, and worry about the people who love them, and feel very far away as my focus occasionally leaks out of me.
Now, I want to be extremely clear – I don't want any of this to read like a complaint. These were inconveniences and frustrations, not true hardships.
We got to continue our trip. We have stayed connected to the people we love by picking up the phone. We have been held by an enormous amount of support, generosity, and grace, and I know it.
But that's exactly what makes the point, isn't it?
If a burst pipe, two days without wifi, and a few low-energy afternoons are enough to disturb the bubble — then imagine what life does to it with the things that actually change everything?
Because this is the part I think about constantly with the people I work with.
I've watched clients get through cancer treatment only to land in the middle of an unexpected divorce, right as they were trying to find their footing again.
I've witnessed people come out the other side of treatment and walk straight into becoming the primary caregiver for their own partner, still trying to figure out how to care for themselves in the gaps.
I've sat with clients living with a chronic diagnosis while raising small children and looking after aging parents andholding down a career — managing the ups and downs of their own bodies in whatever minutes are left at the end of the day.
Nobody gets the bubble.Not even when cancer is in the room.
We almost never get to exist in a place where there's only one thing to tend to.
And that is genuinely overwhelming.
It's also, honestly, how so many of us end up at the very bottom of our own to-do lists.
Women especially are practically trained to put everyone else's needs ahead of our own, and I have seen what that costs.
I've sat with people who, years out from cancer, still feel like they never quite found their way out of the trauma of it.
Not because they weren't capable of healing — but because there was never any room left for them to.
This is the whole reason my work is built the way it is.
It's why I keep coming back to what I callthe six fundamentals of active healing — time and space, context and education, professional care, self-care, identity, and community.
They're the scaffolding that keeps a person from disappearing underneath everything else, and they're also, not coincidentally, the six places where the sharpest objects tend to land.
When the bubble gets disturbed, it's almost always one of these six taking the hit — and usually it's whichever one we've reluctantly set down to keep our hands free for everyone else.
If you're newer around here, or it's just been a while, you can read more about that philosophy here. It's the whyunderneath everything I do.
And you don't have to work with me to use any of this.
You can take a look at your own life this Sunday and ask the un-fancy questions:
Where are the gaps?(which of the six have I set down or forgotten about to keep my hands free for everyone else?)
What's actually going well?
And where could I even things out — even a little — so that I'm not always the first thing that gets cut?
And if the honest answer this Sunday is "there's no room to work on a single thing for myself right now," you don't get an F on the assignment — that's just the truth of where you are, and there's no shame in that.
So no, I can't hand you a bubble.
I couldn't even keep my own intact, and I was on a different continent.
But what I can do is keep reminding you — especially when everything else is loud — that you are one of the things worth tending to.
Not after everyone else. Among them.
And that goes for me too.
I've been practicing all of this from a distance these past two months — keeping myself on my own list, even with the ceiling leaking and the internet dying and much of my heart half a world away with the people I love.
We'll be heading home one week from today. It was never a real bubble, but it's a stretch of life I'll carry with me — and I'm ready to walk back into the familiar Buffalo life I love.
Thank you for being part of this little Sunday ritual of ours. It's one of my favorite things, no matter where in the world I'm writing from.
PS: As You Are Now: A Breast Cancer Self-Care Program for Real Life will launch this summer with limited availability and a special offer just for my email subscribers — and lymphatic literacy is now fully part of it. If you'd like to be among the first to get the details, get on the “first to know” list right here.