This week, I attended an online writing summit. I had no expectations of what I might learn. I found out about the summit on my Instagram feed. They had a free registration, and I thought, “Why Not? I don’t have anything to lose.”
First, the entire summit was filled with amazing presentations, and I received excellent insights from each one I watched.
One session in particular made the entire summit worth my time investment. The presentation was titled “How to be a writer when you have a chronic illness.”
You might think “Is metastatic breast cancer a chronic illness?” Believe me when I say I have seen and had this debate. But, for the purpose of managing time and spoons, there are many similarities between metastatic breast cancer (especially after living with it for fourteen-plus years) and chronic illness.
The presenter, Sandra Postma, offered a different way to think about being a writer when living with a chronic illness. For example:
Write when you can. Write where you can. If you can’t write every day, be gentle with yourself. More importantly, she reminded the attendees, “We are worthy of living our best life.”
That statement made me search out her Instagram account and immediately follow her. Scrolling through her posts, one in particular stood out:
“Can I Thrive with a Chronic Illness? YES!”
In the caption, she asked the simple question, yet extremely difficult question
“What does thriving mean to you?”
That question haunted me all afternoon and evening. The next day during a live write-in session I unpacked the question further in my journal.
I realized I had never redefined “thriving” for myself since I was diagnosed with cancer. Or maybe not since J.R. had died.
Society tells us thriving may include a happy marriage, two and a half kids, a dog (or cat if that’s your thing), a well-paying job, and a nice car(s).
We were thriving as a family when I was diagnosed in 2003. I even continued to work during the original diagnosis at the well-paying job. We put cancer behind us after all of the chemo and the radiation. Even after taking Tamoxifen for 5 years, Cancer was our past. We were still thriving in the good old American societal way.
After I was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer, we had to re-evaluate. At that point, my idea of thriving was living to see our daughters graduate from high school. With a median survival rate of 36 months, I would be lucky to see our oldest graduate.
After a few false starts with medications that didn’t work for me, we finally found one that was keeping the cancer cells in check. I had already watched our oldest graduate and I was well on my way to watching our youngest graduate from high school.
Then renal cancer decided to steal our version of thriving. We switched our idea again, now we wanted J.R. to see our youngest graduate from high school.
Graduation came and went. We both saw her graduate. I wouldn’t say we were thriving. Just a few months later, J.R. passed away. What should have been our time to thrive as empty-nesters was gone in a flash.
Over the past eight years, I have been living (not thriving) while waiting for the next thing to happen. I can’t say it wasn’t without cause: an infected hip prosthesis and subsequent surgery, progression requiring a change in medication, a broken femur, both of my in-laws passing away from cancer, spontaneous fractures in my spine, more progression and another change in medication, a hospital stay due to complications from the new medication, another change in medication, neuropathy from the medication, culminating in another change of medication, and finally four surgeries this year related to side effects of medications that have kept me alive for the past 21 years.
“What does thriving mean to me?”
For me, the definition of thriving is not how society defines it.
Kim’s idea of Thriving is a path to discovery.
In eight years, I have shied away from the opportunity to discover who Kim is. But Kim is more than a widow, a mother, or a daughter.
Through this process, I have defined Thriving as the freedom to discover who I am: what I like, and what I don’t like. Furthermore, it is a chance to shed my Enneagram 9 sloth-ness (as much as possible) that I have embraced like a badge of honor over the last eight years as a protection and recovery method.
If you know me, you know I love a good movie reference. I am proclaiming my Maggie Carpenter (Runaway Bride) era. I have already discovered I like fried eggs, preferably with a side of bacon, hash browns, and possibly some pancakes.
Now that I know what thriving means to me, I am ready to find my true, authentic self.
So tell me, what does thriving mean to you?
