Blog

I believe most of life’s difficulties are caused by our trouble managing disappointment. Challenging feelings like impatience, annoyance, anger, fear, sadness – can all arise out of our failure to manage disappointment.

What we want to happen, doesn’t. Dreams seem ever distant and unreachable. A marriage feels out of sync with your heart. Communications don’t land. Someone dies – you are shattered. Your partner leaves you for someone else or a job or another part of the country.

I always want resolutions to be successful because the New Year inspires new beginnings. On the positive side, resolutions signal that people are in a self-reflection process – identifying what changes might be made and making plans to get there.

Resolutions would be almost like magic – instant change – if they worked. But every year I watch the newcomers to the swimming pool and the gym and I can time them ending their efforts to January 21. I am just as happy to see them go and leave the lanes less crowded for those of us swimming daily year-round, but feel sad for their missed efforts. There is something built in to resolutions that creates failure.

It can be enormously helpful to have enough support after getting a cancer diagnosis. That said, many people just don’t feel like it. Too freaked out to talk to friends and family. Too scared to reach out to strangers. You might think about how to get yourself to reach out when it’s not really your usual path. Sometimes friends and family are not enough, because they say things that don’t feel quite right, even though they are trying to be helpful.

Loss pervades the cancer experience.

The first loss is that life is never the same again. In the many ways that people live their lives, there is usually a past story, a present of immediate to indeterminate duration, and a future. People may be attempting to remain more in their present experience, and there may be a physical and spiritual truth that there is only the present moment, but people are generally organized around living toward a future, and have a story about where they come from and where they are heading.

Cancer changes everything. At the moment of cancer diagnosis, there is a marker in life, which bookmarks personal time as either Before Cancer or After Cancer.

But before that, there is the in-between time, when you don’t quite know what is happening. You may have experienced troubling symptoms for some time, followed by lab work or medical exams. Or, it may have all started with a routine trip to the doctor – you were told that something seems suspicious or wrong. “How long has this lump been there?” After that, you may have gone through more visits and more tests, several weeks apart.

Waiting for cancer – you don’t yet have all the information from your body, from tests, from the doctor – you are scared. The medical system is so crowded, so time-crunched, so expensive and so impersonal these days that it is hard to feel that you are being cared for and cared about when you are waiting for medical information. You spend hours, days, weeks waiting for news and dreading what it might be. The waiting is really hard because there is little that you can control. So you wait. Often.