A Wonderful Young Writer deals with Life with Insight

Since I was diagnosed with Stage 3 breast cancer, and my Mum was diagnosed with Stage 4 Lymphoma, the axis of my world tilted radically.  When I spoke of my anxiety levels, my Pain Management Doctor responded that, 'I would be worried if you were not experiencing major anxiety.  That would be abnormal,'    I knew everything had changed for me as soon as I received the results from the three biopsies they performed, but knowing about traumatic events and life-threatening diseases never are quite the same as experiencing them.  Furthermore, experiencing them NOW is quite different from experiencing a similar situation when I was quite young.

This is not my first experience with a life-threatening disease.  I almost died when I was in my early 20s and at that point, I became convinced I would not live to reach the age of 30.   I responded to THAT threat and trauma by deciding to 'live for the day'.  What was the point of planning for old age if one did not have that kind of timeline?   The fact that the medical profession did not even find the tumour and kept misdiagnosing my condition did not give me any confidence or faith in my survival.  A girl in her twenties is very different from a woman who have lived for decades, however.  I can remember that, on the night before my Law exams, I would sleep the untroubled slumber of a child... never stressed about the results, and indeed had no reason to do so.

I did survive beyond the age of 30 and I had a daughter, and the moment she was born, I became invested in this life and this world in a completely different way.  No longer could I even think of living for the day.  I had to be conscious of the potential effects upon my child of any move I wished to make.  I always believed that being a mother means putting the child first.  I may have made mistakes in the ways I tried to implement that, but she ALWAYS was first where any major decisions were concerned.

In any event, as I grew older, I began to be affected by very trivial worries, even before the Cancer manifested.  I do not know why... whether it is the effect of too many serious medical conditions that cannot be fixed and doom me to permanent disability or if it is something that accompanies age.  A sense of helplessness does foster anxiety.  We are victims of our past only if we do not struggle against those behaviour patterns that were engendered by our worst experiences.

I thought it was best to try to forget.  My daughter argues otherwise.  She believes in confrontation and I suppose, ultimately, the hope of a tangible victory.  I tried to bury the ghosts, and one ought to realise that ghosts never rest in the ground!

The solution to any problem, small or enormous, is to take back your own power.  The following was suggested to me.  One answers one of these questions every day:

This is the link to the soul-searching journal that I found very inspiring:

An Underdeveloped Story