There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from asking your body to do the impossible twice in quick succession. To grow a life. And then, before you’ve even finished learning the shape of your new self, to fight to keep your own.

Olivia Munn had her son, Malcolm, in November 2021. Not even a year and a half later, in April 2023, she was diagnosed with an aggressive, fast-moving form of breast cancer in both breasts. A clear mammogram and a negative genetic test had told her she was fine. It was only when her OB-GYN calculated her lifetime risk score, almost as an afterthought during a routine appointment, that anyone thought to look closer.

“You realise cancer doesn’t care who you are. It doesn’t care if you have a baby or if you don’t have time. It comes at you, and you have no choice but to face it head-on.”

Within thirty days of her diagnosis, she was in surgery. It was the first of four operations in ten months a lymph node dissection, a nipple-delay procedure, a double mastectomy. Later, hormone suppression therapy to keep the cancer from returning, which put her into medically induced menopause. “I’m constantly thinking it’s hot, my hair is thinning, and I’m tired a lot,” she said. Later still, a hysterectomy, to stop her body from producing the hormones her cancer had been feeding on.

This is not a story with a single body transformation to point to. There isn’t one before, one after. There’s a body that carried a pregnancy, and then, almost immediately, a body that was cut into, reshaped, and chemically altered — four times over, in under a year. Anyone who has been pregnant knows that a postpartum body takes months, sometimes years, to feel familiar again. Munn didn’t get those months. She got a diagnosis instead.

We don’t often hear this particular combination named out loud — the body that is still recovering from birth being asked, almost in the same breath, to recover from disease. It’s not one hard season. It’s two, stacked on top of each other, with barely time to catch your breath in between.

What stays with me isn’t the surgeries, though. It’s what Munn said about the night she finally felt like herself again.

By September 2023, after four surgeries, she wasn’t feeling like herself, and she knew it. A friend was turning fifty, and instead of staying home, she decided to get dressed up. Not because she felt ready. Because she wanted to find out if she still could. “I was not feeling like myself and feeling pretty or anything like that,” she said, “but I thought this was a great opportunity for me to get dressed up and go somewhere and just see how I feel.” She did her hair, got glammed up, went to the party and felt, for the first time in a long while, like her best self. That same night, her now-husband proposed.

There’s something worth sitting with in the order of those events. She didn’t wait to feel beautiful before she got dressed. She got dressed to find out whether beauty was still in there, somewhere, underneath everything her body had been through. It was.

When it came to reconstruction, she made a choice that had nothing to do with looking a certain way for anyone else. She chose to go smaller than she’d been before.

“I know a lot of women want to go bigger, but — go smaller. It’s so important to say what you want out loud.”

Even as the anesthesia pulled her under, it was the last thing she asked for. A small, specific act of choosing her own body back.

This is what long-term self-care looks like when the body in question has already been through the impossible, twice. It isn’t a plan to return to who you were before. There is no before to return to not really. It’s the slower work of getting to know whoever you are now, in the body you have now, one dressed-up evening, one honest request, one hormone-fogged morning at a time.

“You start thinking about your mortality differently once you have a baby,” Munn said. “It’s his childhood, but it’s my motherhood, and I don’t want to miss any of these parts if I don’t have to.”

Maybe that’s the whole of it. Not a body reclaimed, but a life still being fought for — one ordinary, undramatic day after the next.

What would it feel like to get dressed up this week — not because you feel ready, but just to find out what’s still there?