Questioning Lumps

encountering obstacles in a smoothening world

Some people just have lumpy breasts, the nurse tells me. This is easier to understand than wrapping my head around medical jargon, or trying to visualize how large 2.5 centimeters is. Maybe the word for benign solid breast lumps — fibroadenoma — will finally stick in my brain, now that I am two years into examining my own. 

I go through these examinations, and pay closer attention to these growths, because of my family medical history. My mom’s breast cancer diagnosis and treatment at age 47 fits into a tapestry of illnesses that my maternal and paternal families have contributed to: there’s brain cancer, cancer that spread through internal organs, AIDS, leukemia, the epilepsy that I outgrew as a child. 

Pastry baking’s traditional aesthetics tend toward the smooth, denoting such as the perfect, the ideal form. We push pastry cream through a fine mesh strainer to ensure there are no cornstarch lumps in the final product; whipped fats should be the same temperature when working with them so that they don’t curdle; cake batters are stirred until the ingredients are well incorporated, meaning that they are no longer distinguishable as independent variables, that they have been fully integrated into a smooth whole.

In baking, we go through these steps to create breads, cakes, and creams that are delicious, and not only that, but a pleasure to take in visually, and then to eat. Sometimes, though, I wonder, is a lump here or there really that bad?

Pastry traditions far precede the digitalization of our lives, our actions becoming a series of if-then statements powered by apps and artificial intelligence. The choices that we make in our day-to-day lives have the potential for endless predetermination, so that we can float through life with privileged ease. This seamlessness, the smooth transactions that happen via clicks, taps, and swipes is a buffer. Such frictionless interactions encase us, protecting us from the dynamism of the world around us. We experience fewer obstacles as well as less spontaneity; an aspect of lumpiness is lost, I think for the worse. 

In Smooth City: Against Urban Perfection, Towards Collective Alternatives, René Boer challenges our society’s focus on perfection being characterized by these smooth transactions and frictionless interactions, identifying the isolation and alienation that are the byproducts of predicted and prescripted interactions and experiences. In the chapter titled Smooth Disruptions, he leans into Richard Sennett’s perspective on the modernizing city: “Or, as Sennett wrote half a century ago in The Uses of Disorder, it is important people ‘grow to need the unknown, to feel incomplete without a certain anarchy in their lives, to learn (...) to love the ‘otherness’ around them.’” If we only expect to know and encounter smoothness, then how can we be prepared for anything other, for the lumps in our lives?

My family medical history is complex. By the age of 26, I came to the sober — and maybe a touch cynical — conclusion that a cancer diagnosis is a likely part of my future, if not for environmental reasons then for hereditary ones. Each narrative of illness in my family opens new questions, forces us to delve into new territory to confront new unknowns, while opening old wounds and reigniting grief from past losses. I remind myself that our past experiences can provide knowledge and strength to contend with new scenarios. After all, our lives are not lived in mechanical isolation: we always have our histories. 

Paying attention to our bodies gives us a more nuanced, embodied form of knowledge, too. The algorithmically determined choices and paths for life that play a large role in our everyday existences are at odds with these more felt and experienced ways of understanding ourselves and the world. Perhaps the knowledge that we develop through our senses, our muscles, and our joints can prepare us to face the unknowns of our lives, as it shows us how we are able to interact with our world, which in reality is hardly ever smooth.