When I was 25 I found a lump in my breast. It felt kind of like a squishy marble I could roll underneath my fingertips, and the moment I discovered it the icy grip of fear wrapped itself around me. My maternal grandmother died of breast cancer. My doctor didn’t love the way the lump felt, and she sent me to a surgeon, who recommended I have it removed. The following week I was on a cold table, counting backward from one hundred.

The next thing I remember was hearing the radio playing and the doctors talking to each other. I was freezing to the very core of my being, and my arms were strapped down. I could feel this awful pressure in my chest. I desperately wanted to speak, to say, “I’m awake. I hear you talking about your weekend and I feel you inside my body and I’m terrified and so, so cold”, but I couldn’t find language, I couldn’t make my mouth form any words. To this day, when I have nightmares they are almost always about my need to say something, and my inability to speak. Often I’m underwater, which is how I felt in those moments. Sometimes I wake up screaming.

I think terror accurately describes my feeling on that table. I found out later that they’d discovered what turned out to be a second fibroadenoma (noncancerous tumor) underneath the first (also benign) one. The surgery took longer than expected, and the anesthesia had started to wear off. Apparently I did groan, they gave me more of whatever it was that knocked me out in the first place, and I went under again. I woke up in the recovery room sobbing and confused, and when I told the doctor I’d woken up on the table, she didn’t believe me, but when I described the conversation she was having at the time, her eyes got wide and she explained what happened. She also told me the tumors were completely benign. Terror, relief and gratitude all wrapped into one experience.

Life is full of everything. We humans crave the good feelings, the love, the joy, the passion, the feeling of purpose and laughter and being so in love with someone you examine their hands, turn them over, look at every line on their palms the way their mother probably did that very first time she held her baby. We all want to be happy, content, at peace. To feel seen and heard and understood. That’s natural and understandable, but because life is full of everything, it’s simply not realistic to expect to feel good all the time.

Sometimes you’re going to feel lost and alone and so sad there will be an actual, palpable, incredibly painful weight where your heart should be. Where it still is, pressed underneath the onslaught of your grief, despair, rage, confusion, shame, guilt, fear or doubt. No feeling is final. The best thing I know to do is open to it all, lean into your feelings as they arise.

Some days you’re going to feel depressed even if you have food in your refrigerator and a comfortable place to live, even if most things in your life are pretty good. Depending on what life throws at you, you’ll have times of intense grief and intense joy, times of being completely in love, and times when your heart is fully broken. You can keep grasping for all the good feelings and resisting all the uncomfortable ones, but that’s the definition of stress–being in one place, wanting to be in another. Refusing to face reality as it is, fighting the truth, which is kind of like trying to hold back the ocean, is exhausting and pointless, and it creates dis-ease. Also, the most uncomfortable feelings are also the ones that tend to lead to the most growth, to a deeper understanding of yourself. Sometimes we need to be in intense discomfort in order to finally make some changes.

Speak out when you can, even if you’re speaking out with the voice inside your head. Name your fears, acknowledge your pain. Feeling strapped down, cold, stuck, unable to express yourself–that’s some of the worst pain we experience. Just swim. Don’t worry about being positive, just be real. Accountable for the energy you’re spreading, of course, and finding a raft when you need one, but real. Sending you so much love, Ally Hamilton