STORY OF MY LIFE CHANGED IN AN INSTANT
I had a new identity — cancer patient — and I learned to be honest about it
Idiscovered I had breast cancer at a celebratory lunch, in a restaurant, on Valentine’s Day this year.
What I remember about that moment was how suddenly the story of my life as I understood it was simply gone. My new identity — cancer patient — enveloped me as completely as a shroud. Then came the coronavirus pandemic, and surgery and daily radiation treatments. Then, I would have welcomed a shroud, because what I felt left with was a totally shattered sense of self. As I struggle to fit the pieces together again, I am painfully aware that lots of those pieces are missing and probably always have been.
As a therapist, I tell my patients that we compose the story of our lives that we can live with, that the purpose of therapy is to do some reality testing of that story to assess its accuracy, the sources of the meanings we attribute to choices we have made (and their consequences), and to the inevitable reality of our ability to manage the stuff that just happens to us.
A pandemic, with its isolation and fear (and for many, open time), offers us a challenge to do this rewrite — if we have the emotional wealth and health to do it.
We can construct our true selves with a foundation built from a more honest, and sturdy story, one that reflects our triumphs and our failures, the capriciousness of the world, and sometimes the simple banality of our existence.
Dreams are stories that reflect our nonconscious narratives. My pre- and post-coronavirus-era dreams are similar in that they both reveal my inner tortures and struggles. But the post-coronavirus dreams have different plot lines and are truly frightening, and yet also strangely reassuring. They are frightening because they are repetitive dreams of chaos and my inability (despite constant efforts) to pick up the pieces.
In my dreams, beads, jewelry, clothing, boxes — the contents of daily life — are strewn around rooms and replicate the second I put one thing away. I am literally drowning in junk, mine as well as that of others. The reassuring part is that my newer dreams have given me more successes than failures at resolving these inner conflicts. Sometimes I allow myself to put the junk away.
My story, before the coronavirus era, was about a woman who was strong and capable and always tried
to manage her life with adaptive good grace. My story post-coronavirus is that my drive for perfectionism was a waste of time and that a theory I had once held as a young philosophy major — that all of life is random chaos with occasional predictable moments — was actually true. Those occasional predictable moments give us the illusion that we can control our lives and make deductions based on those incidents, and that we can prepare ourselves for whatever is next.
But we can’t. Unless our lived life is the same story as that which we hold in our hearts, we will feel disengaged and easily shattered. Our stories now have to honor and embrace the fact of chaos and unpredictability. We will continue to be buffeted with too much bad and stupid news we simply can’t afford to have this incongruence in our emotional lives. Emotional health and wealth come from courageous truthfulness, not from external conspiracy theories or internal, unbridled self-involvement.
I am a woman who has cancer and has made both astoundingly bad and wonderful choices. I am now in the category of “health compromised” people for age and illness. I do not feel compromised. I feel like I am an emerging, informed warrior — one with a mangled breast and an early sunburn, but still, a warrior. I think of burka-style clothing for safe hugging and drive-in theaters returning for safe recreation.
The vaccine that ensures good mental health includes creativity, honesty and grown-up acceptance of temporary restrictions for long-term lives. I may not have had cancer in my original life story, but I do now. It does not define me, and neither does the coronavirus. What defines us is our ability to take action based on science, emotional honesty and active generosity toward others and ourselves.
In the end, honesty is, in fact, the best policy.