On Rebuilding
Six months after my mastectomy, I am told that I am “recovered.” But recovery, as it is culturally imagined, suggests an endpoint, a return. I am not returned. I am not even certain where I am headed. Six months is not after; it is still during. The drains are gone, the crisis has passed, but the labor of rebuilding remains, daily and invisible.
The first months were defined by obvious survival: the tubes of fluid to measure, the impossible task of raising an arm an inch, the narcotic haze that marked time in four-hour increments. That labor had an audience - nurses, doctors, even friends bringing meals. Now, at six months, the labor has receded from public view. It looks like ordinary life from the outside, but inside it consumes everything.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote that the body is not an object among others but the very ground of experience. Six months out, I live this in its most dissonant form. My body is ground that must be remade each day, through rituals of repetition. Scar massage. Stretching arms overhead until the tissue threatens to seize. Silicone sheets placed nightly across incisions that will never vanish. Choosing clothing based on the direction of scar pull. Each act looks small, but together they form a constant choreography of maintenance. If I stop, even briefly, the tissue hardens. Muscles contract. Pain reasserts itself.
This is not progress but persistence. Rebuilding is exactly that: it does not move me toward spectacle or triumph, it only sustains the fragile ground I stand on. Every day, I must repeat the same gestures to avoid regression. Every day, the labor must be done again. As artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles once wrote, “maintenance is a drag; it takes all the fucking time.” I think of that line often, though its full weight belongs later. For now, it is enough to say that rebuilding, like maintenance, is endless.
Rebuilding is also vigilance. Every twinge carries a question: is this ordinary healing, or have I gone backwards in healing? Have I done too much? Have I done too little? Is this ache from yesterday’s walk, or the body warning me of something larger? The vigilance is invisible, but it is labor all the same. It demands constant attention, a quiet hum of background noise. It is tv static you forget about. It is the white noise that just becomes a part of your world. (I wonder what the world will sound like without it.)
Arthur Frank describes illness as a disruption of narrative order. Six months later, vigilance is what sustains that disruption. The body refuses to be background; it demands to be the protagonist of every story, whether I want it to be or not. Days are reliable at this point, and for that I am grateful, but the labor is care, caretaking for my body, requires so much. Physical therapy, Epsom salt baths right after because of the slicing pain, lotion on scars, not being able to fully trust that my body can be mine yet. Not fully knowing if I can do things, make plans, and thus evenings and weekends are unreliable. I am at the mercy of my body - caring for it with love, begging for it to become my old normal, gratitude for all it’s been through, grace for what still needs to happen.
Vigilance is a part of this labor, too. And there is also refusal. Refusal of the cultural script that says six months should be enough, that I should be “back to normal,” that survivorship is the arc of “it was hard, but then it got better.” There is nothing linear about this. The cultural demand for closure, to mark a before and after, erases the dailiness of what it takes to keep rebuilding.
Silvia Federici reminds us that reproductive labor is systematically erased because it does not produce profit, only survival. The labor of rebuilding exists in that same erasure. There are no accolades for the woman who massages her scars nightly, no applause for the hours lost to stretches that look trivial. The work produces nothing visible, nothing that satisfies an audience. It only produces the possibility of inhabiting a body again tomorrow.
This refusal is itself a kind of agency. To insist on naming the slow, unrecognized work of rebuilding is to refuse the lie that healing is fast, heroic, or complete.
Six months later, rebuilding also demands presence. I cannot let the body recede into denial without consequence. If I neglect it, scar tissue thickens, inflammation rises, pain sharpens. It still feels like I am being sliced in my thighs if I don’t exercise enough, or if I move too much. The body enforces attention. Presence, here, is not meditative serenity but constant labor: noticing, adjusting, tending.
Buddhist thought often frames presence as liberation from past and future. But rebuilding has taught me presence as compulsion. It is exhausting. And yet, within it, there is a kind of grounding. If I cannot measure myself against the fantasy of the “before body,” I can measure myself against what I sustain today and the befores of the past. Today, I lifted my arm a little higher. Before, I couldnt raise them to drink water. Today, I walked farther without fatigue. Before I couldn’t go to the living room. Today, I rested when I needed to. Before I had to rest all the time. Presence becomes a ledger of what still exists.
And still, rebuilding is not only persistence, vigilance, refusal, presence. It is also becoming. The body I inhabit now is not the one I had before surgery, and not the one I had in the months immediately after. It is unfamiliar terrain, built through labor that no one sees. Judith Butler has written that vulnerability is a condition of exposure, of being open to others and to the world. Six months later, I live in this exposure daily. Not as a moment of heroic intimacy, but as the ordinary fact of being cut, scarred, reassembled, and forced to continue. A collage of parts, sustained with stitches and glue.
Simone Weil described affliction as an uprooting of life, a proximity to death. Rebuilding after mastectomy is the labor of rooting again, knowing that the soil has changed. The old ground is gone. The new ground must be tended into being. That tending is slow, repetitive, without spectacle. It is invisible to most people. But it is what makes living possible.
Six months post-mastectomy, I am not in crisis. But I am not after, either. I am inside rebuilding: the slow, durational labor that sustains life once the drama has passed. In 1969, artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles wrote her Manifesto for Maintenance Art, a radical text that reframed daily gestures of cleaning, caretaking, and repair as art. She distinguished between development - the celebrated pursuit of progress, innovation, spectacle - and maintenance, which culture dismisses because it does not produce novelty. Maintenance is cyclical, repetitive, unending, and therefore invisible. Ukeles refused that invisibility. She declared that maintenance could be performance, a durational art practice, that its gestures deserved to be witnessed as art, precisely because they are the ground on which everything else stands.
Feminist theorist Silvia Federici extends this argument beyond art, reminding us that reproductive labor - the work of caring, tending, sustaining - has been systematically erased because it produces no profit, only survival. Cooking, childcare, cleaning, nursing, and bodily repair are essential, yet they are culturally undervalued, expected to happen in the background. My daily work of rebuilding belongs to both lineages. It is maintenance, and it is reproductive labor. Scar massage, stretches to keep tissue from seizing, silicone sheets pressed across incisions, Epsom salt baths to soothe pain, vigilance for recurrence: none of these acts move me toward a triumphant “after.” They produce no visible transformation. They only secure the fragile continuity of tomorrow.
Rebuilding, then, is not recovery in the cultural sense. It is maintenance and reproductive labor - the work of persistence, repeated without witness, essential precisely because it is unending. Ukeles and Federici remind us that this kind of labor, though erased from cultural scripts of progress, is what makes life possible. Six months later, I know that to name this labor, to insist on its value, is itself an act of refusal.
I am still here. Not because I have healed, but because I have rebuilt. Each day begins again with the labor Ukeles insisted we recognize: small, repetitive gestures that sustain life but remain unseen. Federici reminds us that such work is dismissed because it does not produce profit, only survival. Rebuilding belongs to that lineage - without spectacle, without reward, but necessary, insistent.
To name this labor is to refuse its erasure. It is to say that the scar massage, the stretches, the vigilance, the presence - all of it is what allows life to continue.