If I had to locate myself during chemotherapy, I’d return to a clip on my phone shared by a friend. It shows me on a beach in Goa at her wedding, filmed at dusk, blurred by movement and low resolution, coloured powder streaked across my skin, arms flung upwards as though I believed unflinchingly in their ability to hold me above the ground. I watched it quite often from bed, bald under a cotton cap, the duvet pulled up to my chin. The body on the screen was mine, but it also felt separate from me. I could remember being that person but I couldn’t quite get back inside her, as though illness had wedged a gap between self and body.

Years later, that image returned to me unexpectedly as I stood in front of three ceramics by Charlotte Hodes at Murray Edwards College in Cambridge. It was a Sunday afternoon; my daughter crawled across the gallery floor towards the display case. Each vessel showed the silhouette of a woman standing defiantly, all gesture and outline. Though featureless, there was a vitality and nerve to the women’s poses that reminded me of figures on Greek pottery: bodies curiously alive on painted ceramic, yet this one had a certain queerness. One image made me stop. It was a mirrored figure in pink and white with a generous hip angled outwards and one arm lifted, as though caught dancing.

I had studied at Cambridge as an undergraduate, but back then I saw and felt the college differently. The university seemed organised around unwritten codes. I tried, with great effort, to work out how to speak in supervisions without seeming stupid, how to occupy an intellectual space where confidence seemed inherited. I had tutorials in Spanish and Latin American literature in this college, and I loved the books I read intensely, absorbing the worlds of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Mario Vargas Llosa – though at eighteen, the conversations about them seemed overwrought. At night, a group of us would escape to clubs in town to dance to RnB and garage, dark rooms where I found another language, one I recognised from nights out growing up in Luton.

I barely noticed the college’s art collection then. It existed somewhere beyond my field of attention, waiting perhaps for another version of me to come across it. Many years on, standing in front of Hodes’s ceramics, I was transfixed. I loved the freehand patterns on the brown and pink surface of Silhouette Reflection, the sculpted leaves and petals that seemed to float around its neck and feet, as if displaced from the cascading blossom on the trees in the garden behind. And the dancing figure, who made me realise I could no longer move without remembering the interruption of illness.

A few days before that trip, I’d watched my baby pull herself upright for the first time. She balanced only momentarily before collapsing on the living room rug, laughing, her arms outstretched towards me. Since giving birth, I’d begun to realise how much of my youth I’d spent trying not to have a body. That is, trying not to be answerable to one. As I entered my thirties, my cancer triggered a kind of estrangement (I say ‘my’ because no two cancer journeys are the same, but also because mine has become subsumed into my identity, as much as I’ve tried to stop it). Since then, I’ve found myself relating to my body as if something unruly had interrupted the more coherent self I prefer to imagine as the real me. Motherhood changed this. Maybe because my body had to respond constantly to the needs of a fiery, perfect, small person, standing and tumbling. That night, after watching her stand, I wrote in my journal:

Pregnancy and childbirth meant facing hard questions. Walks around the block with the buggy and time in bed healing from a caesarean meant being away from the life I normally lived. Going back to Cambridge with a baby felt strange because the city felt so different to when I studied there. Tiny compared to London, where I’ve lived since. Different with a child curious to take in details I had never paid attention to. Yet it felt necessary, to be in a place that had existed in my life before I was ill, when I was younger and had no idea how fragile I was.

After spending time with Hodes’s ceramics, I wandered around the gallery and realised I’d nearly missed a trio of works by Faith Ringgold. In one painting, I found more silhouetted figures, this time dark figures moving under green trees against a red sky streaked with blue. Around the image, handwritten text read: ‘By night we crept softly to muffle our steps. We moved in one body.’ The figures were enslaved people escaping at night. What unsettled me was not only the violence surrounding the scene but the way Ringgold rendered bodies travelling together through fear as though they were carrying each other forward.

Soon my daughter started yelping impatiently in the buggy. I lifted her up. The space was almost empty, only her voice echoed around us. She was too young to understand the stories told by the artworks but her eyes tuned into them. As I comforted her, we crossed through double doors into a raised corridor with windows on both sides overlooking a large courtyard. Water moved around the fountain at the centre. My daughter wriggled until I put her down on the carpet, where she started crawling across the floor, turning her head to check I was there, smiling when she saw me. We didn’t have long before the next feed, the next nap, the next thing that would organise the rest of the afternoon.

As we left, it was drizzling outside and I shaded her little face with a cupped hand. I gave her a bottle before driving home. She slept in her car seat and I stayed aware of her breath while thinking about the dancers on Hodes’s ceramics, about Ringgold’s fugitives crossing through darkness; also the dance on the beach in Goa. As I drove, we passed stretches of rapeseed fields glowing yellow in the sunset, and I wondered if I might not have to make sense of my body’s fragility before I could live in it.