So I had cancer. What's a girl supposed to do with that?
Part of me in the very early days was thinking, "Fight, fight, fight!" That's normal enough. War is a nearly ubiquitous metaphor in circumstances where human beings see a problem to be solved. The war on drugs. The war on terror. We fight corruption. We fight disease, too.
It has a definite appeal: the impression of organization, resistance, action, empowerment. And some things are worth fighting for, I suppose. Naturally when I was diagnosed I wanted to feel like there was something I could do, that my doctors could do, to conquer (see, there it is again) this thing threatening my body--my life!
But war is a rather sorry way to solve a problem. Decidedly unpleasant. Usually ineffective. Itself a harbinger, if not of doom, at least of unintended consequences. And another part of me was thinking, "This stress is going to kill you!" (I have a morbid sense of humor.) I didn't want to be amped up all the time by a drive to stay on the offensive. Maintaining the "fight" end of the fight or flight response for an extended period of time, even if just conceptually, seemed exhausting and, in the end, probably counter-productive. I thought I should really take a deep breath and relax.
On the other hand, I didn't want a quiet outlook in the face of something so dire to become, or seem to the universe or to my immune system, a kind of surrender to the disease, a resignation to whatever it had in store for me. I didn't want to give up the fight. "Give up the fight." Sure sounds like "surrender" to me...
And so I struggled for a while with how to manage my fighting spirit while I worried about remaining calm (which, I can tell you, is not the same thing as remaining calm). Then one day, the simple revelation reconciled these two impulses:
Acceptance is not resignation.
It was obvious once I thought of it, as these things often are. The best thing I could do was get out of my body's way and give it what it needed so that it could do its job properly. If equanimity is good for the immune system, as it seems to be, then paradoxically the best way to fight is not to fight.
The less obvious idea that makes the first one possible is that acceptance of the present moment is exactly that, and no more. It makes no assumptions about the future of any kind, good or bad. It is not a resignation. On the contrary, and again paradoxically, it is a kind of empowerment--a way to face what is difficult (or anything else) without expectations and thus with the utmost clarity.
This was where I found my strength, even before I realized it. This is how I sat, after mammogram and ultrasound led to waiting for a biopsy, without panic, somehow. I just waited. People around me acted like I should be worried, which I remember I found a little oppressive. They were, of course, just being kind. But I took a deep breath--a lot of them, actually--and waited. I wasn't in denial, although I worried about that at first. It was just what needed to be done. It needed to be done if the results were negative, and it definitely needed to be done if the results were positive. You can't fight what you can't see. (Ahem.)
So not long after that, when I was in that between-time after diagnosis and before treatment--by far the hardest part of that six months for me--I realized that the situation was really the same. I had cancer. I needed treatment. And I was going to get it. There wasn't anything else to do about it. That *was* what there was to do about it.
This saved me from so much fantasizing about the future. Thoughts about the obvious worst-case scenario started to feel ridiculous, which isn't to say I never had them. But I started to see how silly and unnecessary it was to upset myself over something that wasn't happening now and I had no particular reason to believe would happen anytime soon. Sure, having cancer is risky; so's driving a car, and I do that all the time! Thoughts about the best-case were better, of course, but were still tinged with the fear of having my hopes disappointed. It was all fantasy and it was all a potentially harmful distraction from what really needed attention--my actual well-being in the here and now. So I set about focusing on what was right in front of me, as much as I could.
I realize that this might sound incredible to some. There is a certain nose-to-the-grindstone practicality to how I got through this ordeal that I know stems in part from my personality, and everyone is different. But I don't think that anyone who knows me would say that I was calm about cancer because I'm wired that way. I'm not naturally equanimous. Practical, yes. Equanimous, no. Especially about myself. I've been working on the ignore-something-until-you-panic-and-then-cry-about-it habit for years. So if I could manage to operate this way in a crisis, surely there's a message of hope in there for others.
Now, for my next trick: Apply all this strength and awesomeness I didn't know I had to my normal life! Ready? ... Ready? ... No, really, any second now! I think it's going to work...
