Fate delivered a present to my doorstep – from Cancer
In it were many gifts, some totally predictable: fear, terror, and isolation. I tried to return them, but they were registered to me and fate had left no return address. I tried to push them into a cupboard, to ignore them, but still the presents tumbled out. I frantically tried to deal with the tumultuous tidal wave of thoughts and emotions. After a seemingly endless time, I sat on the couch, exhausted from my pointless efforts – you can only be terrified for so long.
It was only by chance I saw the glasses at the bottom of the box. I nearly missed them, focused as I was on the (totally warranted, just putting it out there!) big blue box of self-pity I had just unpacked. It was such a pretty blue – a colour you could really indulge in. The box was a dynamic, interactive beauty, full of self-pity, guilt, and catastrophising every negative life event (and those yet to come), joining it all together in a conspiracy-spiced world vendetta against me. It was a lot. The whole thing was a lot.
Finally, from cortisol exhaustion, I put the blue box away and picked up the glasses.
No sparkles, I thought. Does cancer not even know me?
I was struck suddenly by the irony of that thought – you numnuts, Julie, as if cancer even cares who you are. It doesn’t care about anything – whether you’re good or bad, rich or poor, old or young. It just is. Nothing personal, but you don’t matter.
I sulked, turning the glasses over and over in my hand.
They were ordinary glasses – plain and boring. The instructions said they were to look at ordinary, plain, boring things. Why would I want to do that? I have a life-threatening disease eating me from the inside of my tit. I want to experience the exceptionally beautiful, the startlingly magnificent. I want to be transported away from reality, not saturated by it everywhere I look.
My heart sank with the realisation that I wasn’t going anywhere – except the road to the hospital – for quite some time. What I realised then was that the life I was leading – my ordinary life – was no more. In fact, it may never come back.
That’s when I started to wear the glasses. Because suddenly, with the thought of its loss, my ordinary became treasured. The ordinary world of my life suddenly held great beauty and joy in the simplest of things: sparrows splashing in the birdbath, the smell of cut grass and roses, wind on my face, and the colours of the sunset – all extraordinary. The laughter of children, the love from my animals, precious hugs from my man, people giving me their time.
Don’t get me wrong – there were tears and vomit and days where I could not find my glasses. But every moment my body would allow me, I would put them on.
I finished my five-year treatment last month. My cancer is gone.
But I kept the ordinary, plain, boring glasses.
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