Lives aren't stories. They're just a load of things that happen. The place where act one becomes act two, the climax and denouement, they're all retrospective, superimposed by our minds. We are narrative machines. It's one of the reasons I study literature. You don't realise it until you really stop and think, but storytelling is a big part of what it means to be human. We just can't help it.
I've been interrogating this impulse to narritivise lately. My dissertation is all about narrative in relation to illness, especially cancer, about the kinds of stories people normally tell, the ones people expect to hear, and the ones that slip through the gaps. Some of the theory I've been working with looks at the illness stories that make it big, the types of tales that people like to hear or read or watch, why that is, and what effect it has. The types of illness stories that make it into the public eye trickle into people's consciousnesses, telling them that this, and only this, is what illness is like. If you don't fit the model, then you must be doing it wrong.
There is so much of this I have fallen prey to. I've sanitised my own writing at times, weeding out the undesirable aspects, or covering them up with enough humour for them to be palatable again. I've shoehorned things into narrative arcs, to give my life a poetry it never had when I lived it. But as I've thought more and more about it, I've tried to stop myself doing this.
Choosing to tell the nice story is a little bit like lying if I don't acknowledge that there were parts of it where I cursed the universe, or snapped at all the people trying to help me because I was so angry about everything I had lost. I have to acknowledge the hours spent curled into the foetal position trying to forget I have a body, those dark stolen moments in the middle of the night where I wished I would just fucking die rather than live through another day of this. Those days where I wanted to rip my skin off out of sheer impotence and helplessness and terror that I might never get better, trapped inside this malfunctioning body, a vehicle hurtling towards a cliff edge.
Even now, over two years later, I am not better. Yes, I'm in remission, but that doesn't mean everything is okay again. If I was going to be a good little storyteller, I'd tell you that I learned things, that I'm wiser and stronger than I was three years ago, but you know who else is wiser and stronger than they were three years ago? Pretty much everyone. It's a side effect of getting older. To pretend it was illness that made me this way is a stretch that ignores all the other ways illness made me worse. I'm more anxious now than I ever was before. I graduate in June and I don't have a clue what I'm going to do because when everyone else was starting to think about that, I was thinking about how I had managed to stand up for my entire shower, and how my hair is now an INCH long, and how I have to go back to the hospital next week for another bloody test. I was rebuilding. I'm not better, just different.
I won't ever be better, not in the way the stories want me to be. Maybe you think two years is long enough and I should move on now, but the closure you got when you found out I was in remission is not as tangible on my end. When I was first diagnosed they said they were 'treating to cure' but now, nobody will mention the word 'cure' around me because it's a bit too loaded. A bit too final. Past the point of no return, I don't have the luxury of closure, only a precarious sense of crisis averted. For now. I don't know if that ever goes away but until it does, 'moving on' isn't really an available option.
Sometimes, living in the place the stories forgot is really, really lonely.
I wonder how many more people have been hurt by the lies we tell each other. How many people, with lives that look just like mine, are forcing themselves to smile through their chemo because nobody told them there's another way to be. People who keep all their ugly emotions bottled up inside their fragile little hearts because there's nowhere they fit in the story. Who are crossing their fingers waiting for life to resume, not knowing that it will never be quite the same shape it was before.
So when I tell you these things, it's not to be a buzzkill. It's because I'm thinking of the nineteen-year-old girl sitting in the same consultation room today, receiving the same diagnosis. She's wondering if she's going to die, staring blankly at the immediate future with no idea what it will hold because nobody will tell her, not really, not without a shiny candy shell. I do it because I don't want her to spend hours crying into her pillow, thinking she's a freak for being as afraid as she is, because nobody behaves like this in the stories she's been told, and not only is she sick but she's also a terrible person for being so bitter about it. I want her to know that her terror is normal. I want her to have permission to feel and experience everything she needs to and know that she isn't alone.
Screw the nice little narrative. I think my way is better.
