Wendy Irwin

And one day she says to me, you, Wendy, if you can't eat mangoes, what are you going to do with your life?

If you can't eat a mango, it means that you can't do hard things.

And you know what?

In that moment, as she pointed at me, and it must have been something about the light, because it just glistened off her bracelets, and it must have been something about the length of her fingers that seemed preternaturally long at age five, and the rings that glittered.

But I somehow took on that identity.

I don't do hard things.

And that worked for a long, long time.

It meant that I could avoid tough things like disagreement, like a job that I just wasn't feeling, a relationship that just had outlived its purpose.

I didn't do tough things.

And it worked.

So roll forward a couple of decades later.

And it is the coldest, it's the coldest day in November that I have ever experienced.

And I'm sitting in a doctor's office, when in fact I'm in a hospital, and I'm sitting on a really uncomfortable chair.

My bladder is full, and I am debating whether or not I can go to the toilet and risk being traumatised by the mess people have left in there.

And I realise I can't.

But let me go back eight weeks from that day when I met a person that I now call Miss Maudie.

And Miss Maudie, let me be clear, is a thin, fibrous lump of tissue that I find in my left breast.

A hard thing in every sense.

And at that moment, I do what I've always done with hard things.

I ignore things.