There is an almost romantic fascination with the idea that suffering improves people. We admire the person who survives something terrible and emerges with extraordinary wisdom, a renewed appreciation for ordinary life, and an apparently bottomless capacity for forgiveness. We like our hardships to produce something worthwhile. Otherwise, we’re left considering the uncomfortable possibility that terrible things sometimes happen without offering anything meaningful in return.
Cancer has introduced me to a remarkable number of people who seem convinced that my illness should have made me more agreeable.
I should be grateful for the small things. I should stop worrying about things that don’t matter. I should have a different perspective on life, a greater appreciation for people, and perhaps an enlightened understanding of what is truly important.
Some of those things have happened. Others haven’t. And the ones that have are considerably more complicated than they appear from the outside.
I have become more appreciative of certain ordinary experiences, although I suspect that’s partly because I’ve learned how quickly they can become inaccessible. A perfectly uneventful afternoon is a luxury when your calendar is populated by appointments, medication schedules, and the possibility that your body will abruptly refuse to cooperate. There are days when being able to shower, eat something substantial, and leave the house feels almost extravagant.
But this appreciation hasn’t transformed me into someone who finds every inconvenience charming. I still get irritated. I still have petty opinions. I still occasionally dislike people for reasons that would not survive serious examination.
Apparently, metastatic cancer has not cured me of being human.
What interests me is how frequently people confuse a change in perspective with an obligation to become pleasant.
There is an expectation that someone who has confronted mortality should no longer be bothered by ordinary disappointments. As though the knowledge that life is finite should eliminate frustration rather than sometimes intensify it. As though spending an afternoon being infused with medication should make me more patient with someone who has demonstrated absolutely no interest in exercising basic consideration.
I understand the appeal of that narrative. It’s reassuring to believe that suffering contains some hidden mechanism of personal improvement. It gives pain a purpose, even when that purpose has to be assigned retrospectively.
The alternative is harder to sit with.
Sometimes illness simply makes life harder. Sometimes the lesson is something you already knew but would have preferred not to learn quite so thoroughly. Sometimes you develop patience because the circumstances offer no practical alternative, not because you’ve experienced a profound spiritual awakening.
And sometimes you become considerably less patient, because you’ve developed an acute awareness of how much time and energy can be wasted accommodating things that should never have required accommodation in the first place.
I think people are especially uncomfortable when someone with a serious illness refuses to be inspirational.
There is a familiar character we’re supposed to inhabit: courageous, gracious, optimistic, appreciative of every moment. Someone who can turn an infusion appointment into a lesson about perseverance and a disappointing scan into an opportunity to discuss hope.
I understand why those stories resonate. I have been moved by them myself. There is genuine beauty in people finding meaning amid circumstances they never would have chosen.
But meaning and improvement are not interchangeable.
I can find something valuable in an experience without believing the experience itself was valuable. I can recognize that illness has changed me without celebrating the circumstances responsible for those changes. I can appreciate the people who have shown up for me while remaining profoundly angry about everything that made their help necessary.
Those contradictions do not require resolution.
I think that’s the part we struggle with most. We want suffering to have a narrative structure. We want the difficult middle to lead somewhere satisfying. We want people to emerge from tragedy with a conclusion that makes the audience feel better about having witnessed it.
Real life is rarely so considerate.
I am still learning things about myself, although I hesitate to describe that process as growth. Some of what I’ve discovered is admirable. Some of it is inconvenient. There are parts of my personality that illness has sharpened, parts it has softened, and parts that have remained stubbornly unchanged despite an extraordinary amount of medical intervention.
I don’t believe every alteration represents progress.
What I do believe is that we should be allowed to experience difficult things without being expected to justify them through personal transformation.
I don’t owe cancer a beautiful interpretation. I don’t owe anyone a more agreeable personality because I’ve survived something frightening. And I certainly don’t need to turn every painful experience into a moral achievement.
If something worthwhile eventually grows out of all this, I will appreciate it.
But I refuse to confuse what I’ve made of these circumstances with what the circumstances have done to me.
Thank you for reading Mojo & The Mess.
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Thank you for making room for conversations that don’t always have easy answers.
With love,
Izzy
Mojo & The Mess
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