[Cancer]
[cancer] When hope comes in boxes too small to fit my dreams
Beyond all the day to day chaff of having been quite ill recently, my psychological challenge now is how to parse the recent scan results showing me as currently being free of metastatic disease. They come with a sell-by date, you see, and have to re-assessed every four months. So my sense of being clean, of being clear, of being healthy, has an embedded time-based constraint.
This conflicts with my view of my novel-writing schedule, which I normally have a handle on about two calendar years in advance. It conflicts with my travel and convention schedule, which is normally about one to two years out on a rolling basis. It conflicts with my desire to get out in the dating world with an intent to build a new core relationship, a process that certainly takes more than four months, especially given that three of these next four months are going to be consumed in finishing chemotherapy and the difficult early stages of the nearly year-long process of recovering from it.
So how do I find hope when it comes in boxes too small to fit my dreams? What does it mean to be healthy not long enough to do the next thing that wants or needs doing?
I don’t know the answers. I won’t know them for a while, or maybe ever. I’m very reluctant to dice down my dreams, but you go to life with the hope you have.
I wonder what to do next.
Posted: 6:41 am Tue November 15 2011 |
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You are reading the blog of Jay Lake, speculative fiction writer and author of hundreds of short stories, many novels, and winner of the John W. Campbell Award.
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Fran
November 15th, 2011 at 8:45 am…..glass half empty, or glass half full………take your pick dear.
Jay
November 15th, 2011 at 9:14 amOr a 4 oz glass and 24 oz of water…
Harald Striepe
November 15th, 2011 at 9:52 amFocus on the light.
Meran
November 15th, 2011 at 10:39 amWhat do you do now? You take it one day at a time.
You’re in a major battle, and have been given a respite.
Hang in there. Write. It’s what you do.
I don’t mean to sound hard or stern… Just level headed.
(Unfortunately, I know whereof I speak.)
stevie
November 15th, 2011 at 4:03 pmJay
Every minute you spend thinking about what cancer has taken away from you is a minute you are taking away from actually living your life.
If you can’t get a handle on changing that then you could try talking to a cognitive therapist who might be able to help you do so…
Sarah Olson
November 16th, 2011 at 6:35 amKeep your dreams! Don’t let cancer take them from you. Take what life you have and do whatever you can to make it the life you want to live.