Tag Archives: Cancer

Survival is a Creative Act

5 Replies

I feel better today. Spiritually. Psychically. I attribute this to watching “American Symphony” with the incredible Jon Batiste. What he and his wife, Suleika Jaouad, share in this documentary is encapsulated by the line, “Survival is a creative act.”

I’m going to write that on post-it-notes and big banners and stick them all around my home because I have a lot to survive in 2024. I was not feeling good about it. Not too much optimism. And then this phrase pops up in my life exactly when I need it.

Batiste talks about how art finds its way to us when we need it in his speech at the Grammy Awards for best album in 2022. It’s magic. (As is the incredible coat he is wearing.) Sean Thomas Dougherty writes something like this in his poem, “Why Bother?” from his book The Second O of Sorrow. Why bother writing? “Because right now there is someone out there with a wound in the exact shape of your words.”

Survival is a creative act. I looked the phrase up. Ocean Vuong said it in an interview with the CBC. I didn’t look any further. The funny thing is, I’m pretty sure I read that interview before, but the phrase didn’t stick then like it does now. Now is when I need it. And like magic, it found its way to me again.

For a lot of my life, surviving was something I did “on the side.” Then I would rejoin my life in progress. Whatever difficult thing was happening always felt like an interruption. Now I realize it is the main event. It feels good to bring it front and centre. Jon Kabat-Zinn talks about this in his book Full Catastrophe Living. Life is the full catastrophe. Every day. I first read this book when I was about thirty. So I’ve known this for a long time. But it is with me now on a deeper level.

American Symphony mentions Suleika Jaouad’s bestselling book, Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted. Both Batiste and Jaouad are at peaks of creative success when Jaouad has a relapse of the leukemia she describes in her book. What strikes me is the subtitle of her book and the idea of “interruption.” To be clear, I have not read this book, although by all accounts it is excellent. (I don’t read cancer narratives anymore. They bring back too many bad memories.) But this idea that our lives are “interrupted” by illness and other problems we have to solve is one I reject now. Maybe Jaouad does too, but again, I haven’t read her book. If you’ve read it, let me know.

Survival is not a side-hustle. It’s not something we do until we can rejoin our regular life in progress. Our life is whatever is happening. Cancer. Failing hearts. The deaths of our parents, our friends, our dogs. Divorces. Floods and fires. War. Genocide (as victim or witness). A global pandemic. Climate catastrophe. And through it all, our survival is a creative act. It is our life’s work. And to survive while acting with grace and the golden rule at top of mind is a life well lived. This is something I know to be true.

For those following my heart story, I still don’t have a date for the big surgery, but I have reason to believe it will happen before the end of March. I’ll keep you posted. Meanwhile, whatever you are surviving at this very moment, it is a creative act. Honour it.

Cancer is Not a Journey

36 Replies

Cancer is not a journey. Stop with the meaningless platitudes.

Cancer is a kidnapping. A hijacking. You’re going along, living your life and BAM. A bag gets thrown over your head and you are captured and you don’t know where the hell you are going. Or you are at gunpoint, being forced to drive by someone who won’t tell you the destination or how long it will take and you’re trying not to piss yourself. Or you have been thrown out on the side of a desolate highway with no water, no food and no map. You watch the car disappear in the distance. You might die of thirst. You might die.

A random bunch of rogue cells has taken over your body against your will disrupting everything you thought you knew about how your body works and who you are. Then it forces you to go places you don’t want to be. Like chemo. In the chemo room, you try to pretend it’s normal for fluorescent poisons to drip into your arm. You learn a language that you don’t want to learn and can only really speak among other people similarly kidnapped. It’s not like going to Spain and getting to try out a few phrases from the phrasebook you bought in the airport. There are no tapas. It’s not fun. You don’t get to feel more sophisticated and cosmopolitan because of it. Just tired. And terrified. You sit in a room with other tired and terrified people who have their own fluorescent poisons dripping into them and are desperately trying to learn this language and you smile instead of scream because it’s not their fault you are there, so what’s the point of screaming? Cancer doesn’t hear you scream. It doesn’t give a fuck. It’s a fucking sociopath. Sometimes it cuts off a breast just to make a point.

You’ve been kidnapped. Your sweat has a new smell. The smell of fear. Everything tastes like metal and who cares because you can’t keep it down anyway. You are grateful when you vomit and taste bile because it means your body actually might have absorbed some food before it rejected it. You hardly sleep and when you wake up, you wake up to the realization that you have cancer. Every damn morning. Several times a night. After every nap.

You try to think of a plan to get out. There must be a way. You’ll try anything. The hucksters and charlatans come calling offering you snake oil and herbs and magic pills and you will do anything, pay anything, to be freed from this captivity. You have learned the meaning of desperate. You cry. Often. Sometimes with other people. Sometimes alone.

Cancer hijacks your body and it hijacks your voice. There isn’t a person on earth who would want to go where cancer takes them. So stop trying to make it sound like it has purpose and meaning by giving it an archetype and calling it a journey and saying those in the middle of it are brave. It’s a fucking hijacking. People who have cancer are in the middle of trauma. They are scared. They are by turns angry and in denial and grieving.

Some people don’t make it out alive. The hijacker, all hopped up on their power trip, kills them, and there will never be any justice. That’s what cancer is.

Those who live do not come away unscathed from this calamity. Every single one of them has had to face their own death. It’s not pretty. It’s not a waterfall in Hawaii. No one takes a selfie. People who have cancer have to imagine the lives of their children without them. They have to come to grips with losing everything. Some have gone broke paying the ransom. Some have PTSD.

Calling this kidnapping, this hijacking, a journey is gaslighting. Stop it. Call it what it is. Appreciate the enormity of what people with cancer unwillingly face. Of what I’ve faced. I wasn’t on a fucking journey. I was clawing my way back to life from a cave I got thrown into against my will. I have friends in the cave now. Just do me a favour and stop calling what they are facing a journey.