How do you know what happens to you isn’t good?

Notes on randomness, beauty, and the next wave

Last week at a dinner party, I ended up in deep conversation with a man who has been in remission for two years. He leaned over and said, “I don’t even know how to ask this question, but would you go through this all again for what you’ve gained?”

I would. In that moment, I knew what I had written when I was first diagnosed was true: “that this was the best possible thing that could have happened to me.”

For weeks, as I’ve heard from many strangers who have recently been diagnosed, I’ve shared my condolences, yet like the stranger last night, I swallow the thing I most want to say. It’s a prayer for myself before I started treatment and have returned to it when I needed a reminder. I say this treading lightly into a field riddled with toxic positivity and coffee-mug aphorisms, aware of my privileged state in remission, but it’s a mindset that’s helped me find peace.

I hope I can find the beauty. I pray to surrender in wonder and keep my eyes open to what life wants to show me. This, this heartbreaking, earth-shattering darkness, could be the moment everything becomes clear. And if I don’t make it through, I pray I trust it, too, is the best possible thing that could have happened.

It isn’t about finding a silver lining, but rather rising up out of your own drowning body, far enough that the current tsunami you are caught in becomes a single ripple in a vast and interwoven sea. The water that drowns you is the water that holds you is the water that may yet lead you to shore.

There are some days I have wanted to scream, but I find no solace in anger, its weight only pulling me under. Some mornings, I could drown in my tears. The sentiment, F*** Cancer, has a place, but it never soothed me, and ‘trust in God’s plan’ is a gut-wrenching thing to say. I don’t believe things happen for a reason, or rather, I believe we don’t get to know. Is our sense of good or bad anything but Pavlovian? A diagnosis rings the bell, and we flinch before we know what it means. I have found my peace in life’s randomness. Shit just happens. My life is the result of a combinatorial set of probabilities, shuffled all the way to the end. “We tell ourselves stories in order to live”, says Didion, and I think I, maybe more than most, need beauty.

When I was first diagnosed, I immediately tied a story to it. This was my path towards healing, towards wholeness. My faith buckled during treatment as the man-made scripture felt too hollow to hold me. I went looking inwards, through Internal Family Systems and EMDR, for the parts of me that still wanted to be sick, and I peeled myself back like an artichoke to its tender, unguarded core.

Any action, good or bad, shifts the kaleidoscope of life, each new collage of colors more magnificent than the next. The loss is deafening - I will not pretend otherwise - but so, I have learned, is the joy. To quote Gibran, “The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain”. The loss, the grief, cuts a deep hole, your emotional range exploding.

To think, the world could look like this, sound like this, feel like this, taste like this, and I never noticed it.

I sometimes wonder whether you can learn this without pain, or whether an earthquake is necessary to break down the facade of the life you thought you had to strive for. Fear and shame are fragile building blocks, easy to crack once the end is in frame. What is the point if not to love and wonder? You can let this be the thing that burns you to the ground, or let it be the fire that germinates the seed.

And in that joy, I mourn. Does a year of time with my mom counterbalance time with a child I will never have? I trade prestige for honesty, being right for being close. I can’t feel my feet from nerve damage, but I can feel the love of the world flowing back at me. I’ve faced the scariest things I can imagine to the point where I no longer am afraid.

The terror of being cast out from the herd without a map has turned, somewhere along the way, into the thrill of getting to make it up as I go. I’m protective of my peace, the joy I’ve found in smallness, but I’m beginning to wonder what I have to lose by dreaming as big as I can possibly dream.

The first stanza of my favorite song from my ayahuasca family, Forest Path, goes “You are right where you need to be / this moment holds the key.” I sing it to myself whenever I start to drift. My mom is afraid of the medicine, but she saw the inner strength I found through those ceremonies. When I was too sick to sing it myself, she would sing it to me.

When I was at my sickest last spring, late at night in the hours when dreams and magic converge, the bright light of an angel came to me. She taught me to leave my body. In that darkness, I was an astronaut, holding her light like a tether as I stared down at the blue sphere below. I am certain of only this: there will come a moment when I leave all that I know behind. But what happens between now and then is mine to make.

And as I sail on this turbulent ocean, I pray, whenever the next wave rises - and it will rise -, I will find the beauty in it, and know it, too, to be the best thing that has ever happened to me.

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Sending you all of my love. Thank you, as always, for reading and for sharing my words. My website with more of my writing is here. Many thanks to Maya C. Popa for introducing me to Amy Hempel’s The Man in Bodega and sharing this wonderful line: How do we know what happens to us isn’t good?

Love,
Lou

My post from my first diagnosis:

Stage IV:

Remission: