Late last night I opened my NHS app to check for results of a DEXA scan I’d had in November last year. No, I should not have done this late at night. But anyway … there it was, the dreaded sentence, “The patient has a very low bone density as defined by the T-score at the left forearm and is considered to be osteoporotic according to the World Health Organisation guidelines.”

Oof. It wasn’t really a surprise. I’ve lived with chronic pain from worsening osteoarthritis for many years. I’ve had both hips and one knee replaced. I had chemo in my mid-30s for my first breast cancer and treatment made me medically menopausal and infertile. I spent years researching postmenopause for my doctoral research (the lived experience rather than purely medical, but obviously they’re connected). I’m now coming towards the end of the second draft of the non-fiction, non-academic book of my thesis, Being the Change about how we can live an engaged and creative postmenopause which Virago will publish next year …

All of which means I knew that having been postmenopausal for so long (I’m 62, so that’s well over two decades already) and not able to take MHT as I’ve had two breast cancers, along with the effects of poor childhood diet and intergenerational poverty were likely to show up as osteopenia at least … even so, the words on my screen came as a shock and a sadness.

I think perhaps I’d somehow been hoping I might be spared having something else ‘wrong’ with me. I’ve done yoga for decades, I’ve run on & off for years (not on the new joints yet), I’ve been strength training for 11 months (unfortunately only 11 months but at least I’ve started), as an adult I’ve eaten well, I never smoked and I haven’t drunk alcohol for over 8 years. Even though I feared an osteoporosis diagnosis was likely, I still hoped.

Of course I didn’t sleep. I worried, I fretted, I cried a little, I spent way too long searching the internet and coming back to what I already knew – certain supplements don’t work with my body (I’ve tried), yes I can always eat more oily fish and I will, I’ll swap spinach for kale, I’ll keep on with weights and all the other exercise I do – but basically, while there might be some medication possibilities, there’s no miracle cure. I live in an ageing body that has been through a great deal and some of how my body is now is the cost of surviving two cancers and one ruptured brain aneurysm and brain haemorrhage.

Finally, after five hours of feeling like crap, at 4.30am, I fell asleep. I woke up feeling sad and concerned. And I let myself feel this. I am letting me feel this. It’s a grief, this loss of belief in our bodies’ ability to withstand anything, it’s an erosion that happens with serious illness – I’ve written before about losing our mortality virginity with a cancer diagnosis. It’s a reminder, yet again, that I am ageing in an ageist culture and I too need to root out my internalised ageism whenever it shows up. And bloody hell, it’s showing up now.

But/and … I also went to the gym. I lifted weights and pushed myself. I went for a fast walk in our local park and let my body get what Vitamin D it could from the patchy January sun. I don’t expect to feel fine about this, yet or maybe ever. And I know that feeling what I am feeling – the crap, the sad, the frustrated, the poor me, the unfairness – feeling it all is the only way to move forward.

Feeling the hard makes space for the good. When I came out of the gym to meet my wife I was dancing to Pharrell Williams’ Happy in my ear buds. Not that I had finished with the upset or anything near that, but after a dire night, and a sad morning, I had enough energy to work out and let myself dance a little. That fuck-it joy didn’t last longer than a couple of minutes, but god it felt good.

I’m on it with diet and exercise and self care. But unlike my many other experiences of embodied difficulty, I now know that the real self care is letting me feel what I feel. Not fighting it, not pushing to feel better before I’m ready, just letting me be how I am. I’m 62. I’ll be 63 soon. I’m at the start of old and my body knows it. And, because I am my body, I know it too.

Hilariously/predictably/painfully this diagnosis came through about 36 hours after I’d shared this image on Insta as part of 64 Million Artists’ January Challenge – throwing some daft shapes in the gym changing room after deadlifting 50kg and feeling like my newest hip and slightly less new hip and new knee were working well together – feeling in me, in my body.

And so, in a the kind of paradox that existential psychotherapy adores, this is me feeling fit and strong and able the day before yesterday and this is osteoporotic me today. All me, all joined up. Just as you are all you – all joined up. The good stuff, the hard stuff, the in-between stuff. We’re not only ourselves when things are going well. We’re ourselves when it’s hard too.