I’ve been thinking about names for things and the stories we tell ourselves. Recently a friend of mine wrote a bit about stories in her blog, Words of Love.
I listened to the word “awful” as it came out of my mouth when someone asked me, “how was your trip?” Sure it was usually a two hour trip turned four with 10 mph traffic on a winding two lane road, with Eva screaming and constantly unbuckling her seatbelt and at one point actually kicking the car door open as we drove along at 50 mph. But I felt a little sick when I said it. “Awful” wasn’t true.
It was amazing to see the wildflowers that we usually would whiz past at higher speeds. Eva’s whining stopped us at a rest stop where we discovered a treasure of a picnic spot (And we even had a picnic with us!) It was fine. It was even great.
So “awful” was a shorthand name for a story, the story of Kristen’s day. But when she stepped back and looked with attention, she noticed that a lot of the day’s component bits carried a completely different storyline, a story of a day that may have had some awful bits (the door-opening sounds rather alarming) but was overall maybe pretty good. The simple act of noticing the day, changed it.
I’d been thinking about this, about the kind of shorthand we fall into that conveys prepackaged ideas, and how it shapes the story of our own lives in our own minds. So I wrote a comment on the blog, more or less this:
Someone I love has cancer, and I need support and I’m scared. It is easy when I’m tired to reduce this story: Someone says, “How are you?” and I reply, “I’m having a terrible summer.” To be fair, sometimes that is a useful social shorthand for, “I need your kindness” or “I am bearing witness to my own pain and confusion.”
But I am trying to be scrupulous. Now more than ever. I am not, in fact, having a terrible summer. I am having a summer filled with small moments, some of them terrifying, some of them full of grace, some of them just charmingly everyday.
I am not a Pollyanna. By which I mean I am not lying, claiming that terrible things are just dandy. They’re not. But I refuse to let the story of my life be rewritten as a one-note tragedy. I am right here, and I can tell you my life contains both fear and delight. Every day. Still.
This is the thing. Noticing things helps you write your storyline. Especially with something as monolithically dread-inspiring as cancer. The traditional story is: Cancer Is Purely Terrible. But cancer was foisted upon our pre-existing lives. Val and I are still here, still living our lives, and our complex crazy lives have always been full of quirky beauty. So I’m keeping an eye out for the beauty.
This is not a position of poignant defiance In the Face of Cruel Fate. Mainly, it’s a lucky habit, this Noticing, turned into a survival strategy. But also I think it’s becoming an article of my faith.
Part of it is straight-up survival: relishing the small sparks of delight helps me to balance against the heavy drag of cancer’s relentless uncertainty.
But also I’m finding it’s empowering for me to notice and tell my own story, by which I mean both the details of my life and the meaning that infuses them. I think that maybe noticing it is telling it. The act of noticing the texture and flavor and components that make up my day and my life – that’s what shapes the story I’m telling myself and that’s what shapes my actual reality.
Do you see what I mean? I don’t mean it in some New-Age hogwash kind of vague way. I mean very specifically, that when I pay attention and notice that my life consists of many things besides cancer and fear, then, you know, the terrorists cannot win. (Remember when we used to say that?) When I pick beans in my garden and crack up at Val’s jokes and notice the comfortable weight of my body in bed in the morning, the fear can’t confuse me into thinking it’s all there is. It’s not all there is.
But if I didn’t look around and see for myself the actual rich complex weirdness of my actual life, it would be so easy to let some of the bossiest, drama-queen emotions dominate. But that would be… boring. It would be abandoning my actual intricate life for a simplified archetype (ie. Cancer = Bad Times). In my experience life’s way messier than that.
So here’s to the messiness. I think it can save us.
Deborah
p.s. for example, the county fair:
I am so glad you are finding some beautiful and normal ordinary moments in your summer, despite the cancer. My partner, Mary, and I remember times of laughter and silliness throughout her times of diagnosis and treatment, because it was almost impossible not to laugh or enjoy things when we seemed to have been transported to an alien world of unpronounceable drug names and horrid side effects and scary statistics.
We laughed over the idea that when she and her two older sisters had their mastectomies, their boobs would get to heaven before them, and Mary’s mom (who had died the year before) would find these boobs and say something like, “Oh those girls, they never can keep track of their things!”
The whole process also gave us perspective, as when, three years after her treatment we were faced with the unexpected expense of having to replace the rotted subflooring in our kitchen and part of a rotted wall and, oh yes, the entire kitchen, we could watch the money fly out of the window and read the estimates and when our family said, “Omigosh, what are you going to do?” we could honestly reply, “It’s bad, but it’s not cancer.” And that was true: it was just a kitchen.
Thanks for these thoughts – they are inspiring and humbling. I am pondering and repondering.