Gift of Desperation

I have been thinking about the good of this year. I didn’t plan on a complicated relationship and cancer, but who does? I have written so much here about what is scary, hard, worrisome and painful. But there is another side and I have to stop and remind myself of that sometimes too.

I’m not a fan of the “cancer is a gift and made my life more meaningful” school of thought. There are many other gifts I’d like and many other ways I’d prefer to find meaning. I’ll take community service and beach vistas over cancer any day but here we are.

Some of the good?

In the last 24 months I have had to get on my knees and surrender more than I ever have before—and I have surrendered more deeply. This has certainly affected my relationship with my faith and spiritual life. I began working with a spiritual director and began to study spiritual direction myself. The relationship and the bonus of living with cancer and being a caregiver with a Scarlet Letter got me back to doing intensive therapy and doing that work at a new level of intensity as well.

That willingness came from the gift of desperation.

And out of that has come new understandings of myself, my family, new ways of thinking and from that new ways of behaving. It’s a work in progress for sure but I can see the changes that I wanted for years but could not quite get to. My thinking—ever so slowly—is changing and thanks to the gift of desperation—I am getting closer to the woman I want to be.

And yes another gift has been sensuality and sexuality. because I was pushed—the gift of frustration and annoyance at the reticence to talk about cancer in the official world of Cancer Land—I started reading and writing and talking about sex and cancer, and well, you can’t do that with out doing your own home work, so now I also have a great sex life and who would ever have guessed that would be an outcome of these really tumultuous years.