Extending grace…
Many years ago someone asked me, “Why are you so hard on yourself?” He was a professor in graduate school and this question wasn’t germane to my research. His line of inquiry was too faux therapy especially in an academic setting where I was paying loads of money to learn from this person, not to examine his impression of me. It was a question better suited for him to invert and ask in the privacy of his own self-examination. “What kind of systems/ institutions/ cultures have we created (and continue to perpetuate) that demand perfection of human beings?”
OK. Stop. Wait.
I started writing this a few days ago. I promise, it was all going somewhere. This was all leading to some thoughts about how cancer and chemo has lead to making certain day-to-day things challenging. And ultimately, how I need to extend grace to myself, that I’m doing the best I can and this is just where I am with things.
Or, at least, that’s where I think this was all going.
But part of this whole “having cancer” thing is that I have times when I can’t recall words or trains of thought, where not only does my body feel sluggish but my brain does too. And I hit one of those moments and I couldn’t carry on finishing this post. I needed sleep.
But also: “extending grace” to myself felt like I was just completely passing over the part where I’m also just really pissed and, at times, in a fair amount of pain. The basics are hard. Eating is hard. Finding things I can eat that are also healthy feels impossible. Going to the bathroom is hard. Cleaning is impossible. And I’m lucky: I have a lot of people in my life who are willing and able to take on some (a lot) of this, but, well, it still all sucks. And the people in my life are also burdened by this. My spouse spends far too much time on the phone with insurance and billing trying to fix their mistakes while they breathe down our necks with threats of sending it all to a collection agency.
I overheard a conversation at the cancer center in which a patient was having a hard time arranging transportation. I’m not in that situation. I have transportation and I have people willing to drive me if it ever comes to that. Part of me feels like I should be grateful that I’m not in the situation that that other patient is in, trying to make it to a chemotherapy appointment. But mostly that feels like, “well, it might be shitty over here but at least I don’t have it as shitty as that person has it.” When really, why should being sick be this shitty for any of us?