Sleeping Snakes and the Lake
It was a warm June afternoon. I was in my new therapist’s carefully curated, sunlit room. It was our first session. After I had given her an outline of my cancer story, and she asked me when it was, I had started to feel well.
I groped for an answer I knew wasn’t there. I stared at the window, as if the answers to this question were hidden somewhere in the white venetian blinds. They were not. The truth, I quietly realized, is that I had not been feeling well, had not been living well. When I went back to work full time two years ago, I gave everything I had—and more that I didn’t, to my work, grateful to be alive. Ignoring my body. I had recovered enough to function. But four months ago, I started having debilitating panic attacks at work. I had to listen.
I couldn’t answer her question, and a moment a week ago popped into my mind: Should I tell her about my eyelashes? And the message they had for me? What learning they uncovered?
One week ago, I was getting ready in front of our creamwooden mirror, its painted green tendrils swirling and reflecting the soft light of the sun, when I noticed the beautiful baby growth of brand new eyelashes on my lower lids, fluffy, fresh from the earth. I felt a surge of love and wonder. I could not believe that five years later, they would be able to return. It was magic. Five years, I kept repeating to myself. Five years. I had no idea I could still be recovering all this time later. And that’s when I heard my inner Wise Sage: healing and recovering are completely different.
My new eyelashes held a seismic but silent truth: I am still, five years on, in the early stages of healing.
That realization brought a huge release of pressure. I started laughing a lot more. I started to notice other tiny “eyelash”-sized discoveries all around me that made me feel part of a wider tapestry: the tiny cherry-red baby leaves, perfect miniature representations of my Japanese acer trees; the tiny heads on my chamomile, not there yesterday, but here today, announcing to the grass and sky: I am here, I was always coming back. Wild strawberries held off the ground by a self-seeded lemon balm. I am not doing this alone.
For the first time in a long time, I felt hope. Not the hope I had been trying to cultivate in my mind with the desperate chanting of mantras and affirmations stuck around my mirror since the horror began; no, I sensed a deep, earthy hope, the kind the soil doesn’t feel, but knows. It made me feel safe: my body was still only beginning to shift and recover enough to grow some baby eyelashes, so what else was to come? What other wonders were in store for me? There is a future me that genuinely enjoys wellness, I realized, she was just warming up, having a stretch; not out of bed yet, but definitely thinking about it.
So, I found myself wanting to clear and cleanse everything around me. I attacked my underwear drawer after excavating fossils and dinosaur bones behind the kitchen sink. And that’s when I found them.
Inside my underwear drawer, amongst the debris of old sex toys and thongs three sizes too small, I found my hair—the hair I was supposed to have sent off for donation five and ahalf years ago. Sleeping snakes, the softness skewered me. I say “found,” but found is the wrong verb because finding something means that you didn’t know it was there. I knew my hair, plaited neatly, cut and saved, was in there. Why did I leave them hidden in my underwear drawer instead of donating them as I had planned? Most days, I would see them, coiled smooth and shiny, just lying there. I took them out gently, like they might bite, and lay them on top of the chest of drawers, put on my swimming costume, tied up my hair, and headed off to the lake. The water would know what to say.
I had started open-water swimming in darkest February, using the cold to shock my nervous system, to reset something that was broken when the panic attacks at work started. Four months on, and I feel new—not my old pre-cancer self, not anyone I have ever been before. I feel true, no longer diving into be shocked—or even soothed, but to commune. I am here for the water as much as the water is here for me.
During my lake swim that particular morning, on my way round the small island to say hello to the terrapins, snatches of clear water appeared and rolled on over and over; my hands and arms seemed to stretch further, and I noticed for the first time how strong they were. I glided through the ripples as if I were reaching for something that I'd just realized was actually mine: I am worthy of this peace, I thought. This is mine. This is me. I wasn’t consciously thinking about my hair. I had started, ever so slowly, to think less when in the water. It was blissful.
While ducking through a small wave, the word shame slotted into place inside my mind: I had hidden my hair because I was deeply ashamed. I stopped and held onto my pink float, my legs making wide, slow circles; I noticed the wind softly smoothing patterns across the glittering surface, trees surrounded me nodding in agreement. Now is the right time to admit to the lake and myself that I am still ashamed, I thought. Weight left me. Ashamed of having cancer? Surviving cancer? Blighting my children’s childhood?
I hadn’t acknowledged shame before, but saying it diminished its power; although heavy, there was a lightness left behind, it felt like tugging out the whole root of your deadly nightshade. It’s only when you pull it out and unravel it that you see what goodness it was choking.
An hour later, as I climbed out of the lake and placed my feet firmly on the soft grass of the bank, the name Emily Dickinson flashed across my mind: her poetry will be snuck into the love letters of my heroines in my novel. Of course. I looked up at the blue sky, breathless, and then down at my brown bare feet. And I thought: this is what it means to be free. My own thoughts, free as the wind, coming to find me with ideas for my novel.
I ran to get my pen, notebook, and towel. Sat on the bank. Overflowing with ideas. If I can understand my shame, really understand her, and from where she came, I can live well. I will take her and put her in the sunshine. I will sit with her. I will love her. I will listen to her. I will write her stories.
And then I will let her go. 🌿
Katie Murray
Therapeutic teacher. Diagnosed at 41. ILC, Stage II, ER+.
Katie is a writer, teacher, and lover of all things green and natural. She is also a mum of four children. Most at home in her garden, Katie loves reading, sowing seeds, planting, and tending her little patch of earth. Or, open-water swimming in “her” lake. Katie lives in Nottingham, United Kingdom, with her husband and two (younger) children.
“Sleeping Snakes and the Lake” is published in Wildfire Journal’s 2025 “Living Well” issue. Order a print or digital copy of the full issue in our shop. Available in the subscribers’ library as well.