Joyful, Anyway

I run through today's litany of activities: praying for the Best Friend's dumb relationship, waiting on my mammogram result for a suspicious lump, worrying about someone who is irritated with me (I think, not sure), and calling my mom to ask about her gum graft surgery while pretending that I am also recovering from my own gum graft surgery to see if I can make her feel sorry for me. But that's just for fun. And of course there's my actual job: grading, research, faculty meetings, interviewing for my podcast, and writing, writing, writing.

 

After an hour or so, the mania has subsided. Digging into some historical research gives me the strange synchronized calm of a woman in motion. I have always been quieted by work, squeezed into the wonderful necessity of what is in front of me. At the very least, it feels necessary, and that feeling turns down the volume on the deafening needs of everyone around me. Marriage made me a wife, my son made me a mother, and cancer made me a feminist. Had I not been diagnosed, I never would have turned up the sound of my own screaming desires. Not that anyone else heard them scream. I think, in the end, I mostly sounded like I was politely clearing my throat.

It has been ten years since that diagnosis, which is a shocking gift. And now that I am technically cancer free, I am left with the health problems of a very optimistic septuagenarian. I lecture strangers about colonoscopies. I have mysterious ailments and random lumps that make people start sentences with "Well, at least..." And like every retiree, I accept ongoing and future pain as an unwanted assignment.

Sometimes suffering will make you better, so much better than you wanted to be. It has the wonderful advantage of sloughing off some of the soft rot in the human heart. Like ignorance. That is probably the first thing to go. Slice, slice. Then arrogance. Cut, cut. This is the forced humility of experience. It's hard to feel better than other people when you are certain that you are made up of sadness and deli meat.

Because suffering is mostly a knife, cutting away parts of you that, all things considered, you would prefer to keep thankyouverymuch, and when it ends—when you survey what's left—people will expect you to be filling your gratitude journal, while you feel like a coroner.

Hard to say it better than Job. We are "born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward."

People who have suffered greatly—suffered unimaginably—will say that you never set your burdens down exactly. You learn how to carry them as you shoulder all the other invisible challenges that come with the imperceptible changes of becoming someone new. But I had sort of hoped that there was an unspoken guarantee that it would all get easier.

 

It didn't. Life went on and it became harder and harder to feel like it was the miracle everyone told me it was.

I have been explaining all this to my psychologist, Henry, who I started seeing when I was very sick. I report that I've been googling the symptoms for an anxiety disorder. "I feel buzzy," I say. "Like I'm alert but it's not useful..." He explains that what I have might not technically be a disorder if what I'm alert about (cancer! loss!) is concrete and likely imminent. How comforting. Perhaps it is the feeling that philosopher Martin Heidegger described about the moment people awaken to their own helplessness. This is the thrownness of life, Heidegger explained, the way we cannot choose our future. We drift between currents like helium balloons in the sky.

I know how today will go because it was the same feeling yesterday. I will feel like I was supposed to get to something—some list? some task? some relationship?—that gives me back a sense of fullness. There, I did it. But when I pile up every effort and attempt at completing something, it is only then that I can see the unfinishedness of it all. The poet Anne Sexton was right: "I am a collection of dismantled almosts."

Eventually I will notice the ridiculous wastefulness of all my efforts to be smarter, thinner, kinder, and entirely up to date on international affairs (and the latest season of Love Island). Sometime before bed I will have to reckon with the amount of time I spent finding wide shoes on the internet for the modern paddle-footed woman or trying to cycle off the thirteen pounds gained on last summer's camping trip from Hades. What I thought was progress was probably an imperceptible decline. The patron saint of the middle-aged woman, Nora Ephron, said of all this effort: "Maintenance is what they mean when they say, 'After a certain point, it's just patch patch patch.' "

I would gladly say any of this out loud, but I alternate between feeling embarrassed, justified, and like a closet narcissist. It feels like wanting more shouldn't be a question at all. A person who almost lost everything should know precisely the value of everything kept and everything lost. I should be too grateful to ask for more.

 

Except that no one tells you how fast it goes—the speed at which you can lay your own dreams down. After a diagnosis, a layoff, a divorce. A miscarriage, an accident, or an excruciating goodbye. You can lay the future down. You must.