Loss and Change

Most people hate change. Particularly when that change is radical and forced upon us against our will. We resist the change with all our resources - hostility, denial, withdrawal, avoidance and so on. I know them all very well, having spent a long time actively resisting the change wrought in my life by the big C.

I wanted to return to the life I had and who I was before my diagnosis. In other words, to restore my normality. This was my quest and I was terribly afraid of failing to achieve it. For if I let go of my normal life, the activities I valued (e.g. cycling, hillwalking) and the people I did them with, I would be losing myself. And then I would be lost and alone in an extremely painful place - just poor, defenceless me and the big C.

This desire to protect yourself is quite normal. Because change always entails  loss and pain. The more radical the change, the more traumatic that experience. Thus we seek to avoid the pain of loss, even when it is unavoidable. But as Thoreau observes, 'not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves'.

So how did the change happen for me? I'm still working it out, but I think it goes something like this.

Over the past year in particular, a number of different (and contradictory) processes have been going on at the same time. Firstly, all sorts of resistance and plenty of attempts to prove that I was still who I thought I was. Inevitably there was lots of disappointment and pain in this. Secondly, withdrawal into self-pity and mourning for who I used to be, alongside bouts of anger and renewed resistance. Thirdly, experiments with new ideas and activities - some more tentative and soon abandoned, others more intensive and prolonged (e.g. singing in a choir). Fourthly, some sort of acceptance and revaluing of who and where I was - that the past wasn’t as good as I had made out and the present wasn’t as bad as I feared.

It now strikes me that anthropologists would call this experience a 'rite of passage'. These take place in traditional cultures to shape important changes of identity, for example the transition from childhood to adulthood (Victor Turner is the authority on this).

What have been the parameters of my passage? It's hard to be specific. In recent years there have been a series of important changes in my life: the death of my mother (my remaining parent), early retirement from work, the death of my brother from cancer, my own cancer diagnosis and treatment, then my partner leaving me.

This is where I've come from. It's been quite an ordeal. But where have I arrived?

In my previous post I said I had become more fully myself. This feels very true. I called it a process of becoming. This process has also been a reconstruction.

Like Humpty Dumpty, I had a great fall and my pieces have been put back together again. But they don’t fit as before because some of the pieces are bigger, some are smaller and there are also some new pieces that didn’t really exist previously. So I'm a refocused and rebalanced person, somewhat more than I used to be, clearer and more confident of who and where I am.

As Oscar Wilde pithily observes, 'be yourself; everyone else is already taken'.