Shooting myself in the foot …

OTHER people’s emotions are not my — nor your — responsibility. I don’t know about you, but while I see the sense of that statement, I have a hard time acting accordingly.

It began like this. One of my sisters lectures engineering at a university. The students are writing end-of-year exams, and one of her final year students is a young man whose brother is dying of cancer. The dying brother wants his healthy sibling to write his exams. He is hoping to see his brother graduate.

“Yes, but that is selfish,” said another sister. “Too much pressure, and he should allow his brother to say goodbye.”

“It’s not selfish at all,” I countered. “It’s thinking of the healthy brother whose life is going to go on.”

So far, so good, but then I went on; neatly shooting myself in the foot.

“Believe me,” I said, “When you are so sick you think you might die — so not even when you know you will die — one of the hardest things is that you spend a lot of time managing other people’s feelings.”

I stopped to think.

First I had intimated a pure motive — thinking of the other’s future. Then I killed it with another motive entirely — managing the other’s emotions, so that their raw grief, or anger or whatever would not impinge on mine.

Emotions, especially intense ones — love, grief, anger — they are hard to deal with when they are unbridled. I doubt many would disagree that we shy away from them because of their capacity to consume us, whether they are our emotions or others’ directed at us. They terrify.

I know I am not the only one whose knee jerk reaction is to try to manage away other people’s emotions. “You don’t get to tell me how I react to your getting cancer again,” an indignant and distraught, friend told me once.

I had no answer. I don’t think there is one. The depth of her feeling shook me. We think we want to hold another’s heart in our hands until we do. Then the responsibility of it all has us packing sandwiches in a spotted hankie.

She was right, though. None of us gets to dictate another’s emotions. Heavens, quite often we don’t even get to dictate our own.

The greatest teachers

When my daughter’s school year started earlier this year she landed up in the classroom of a teacher known for her strictness. She was anxious and nervous.

I told her that it was often the strictest teachers that you best remembered, respected the most and from whom you learned the most. As often happens, I should have been listening to myself.

I am beginning to realise that one of my biggest mistakes in life has been trying to guess, and therefore mitigate, people’s reactions to what I wanted from them, and from life. This would then lead to me contorting myself to suit them so that the negative fallout from my demands was as small as possible. It’s a screwy way to live.

Scientists say that the link between stress and cancer is weak, although there are well-known stress-related illnesses.* Here’s what Stevan Hobfoll, PhD, the Judd and Marjorie Weinberg Presidential Professor and Chair at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, IL, and member of the American Psychological Association (APA), has to say: “Stress is significantly associated with virtually all the major areas of disease. Stress is seldom the root cause of disease, but rather interacts with our genetics and our state of our bodies in ways that accelerate disease.” http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/289969.php

For some time now I have believed there is a link between stress that I have suffered, and going to a psychologist for several months has uncovered stresses that I overlooked or believed were not there. I suppose it would be comforting to find a reason for my having developed cancer. It would locate it somewhere. People almost always try to find reasons and meaning in life, and, for me, cancer is part of my life.

Trying to head off the stress that would come from disappointing people by adapting my behaviour to suit them has been a pattern in my life. Whether it is part of that which is behind my having developed cancer, who knows. Part of me wants to claim it is. It would make being a cancer survivor more palatable. None wants to be diagnosed with cancer, and two of the most devastating days of my life were the day in 2000 that a doctor first told me I had cancer and the day in 2009 I was told it had come back. Each was enormously crushing in its own particular way.

What I realise now is this. In the end, it doesn’t matter what caused my cancer. Having a reason would be nice in that it would give the diagnoses meaning in some odd way. What it can’t do is change things. I had thyroid cancer. I had surgery and radiation. I was cancer-free for nine years and then told the thyroid cancer had moved to my liver. That was wrong. I am pretty sure I will still be attracted to news that offers reasons for my cancer. It’s my human desire for meaning at work.

I also know that when I was confronted with the news that the 2009 cancer diagnosis was mistaken I was first shocked and stunned. Then I was angry. There is a part of me that is still angry — all that emotional turmoil that lies behind being told you have inoperable, untreatable cancer that you will just have to live with (hoping that it is slow growing). But even then I knew that if I gave in to that anger it would consume my life, leading me down a path of negativity. I let it go. It was a conscious decision, and I am proud of it. It was the right decision.

But I harboured (and harbour) other anger. These months and months of therapy have helped me let go of a lot of my anger. It is no longer my default emotion, that is now sadness. From tragic world events to (my largest trigger) people who treat me as if I don’t count, my reaction these days is generally sadness, not anger. I realise now that anger was my carapace, my shield from emotions that made me vulnerable — hurt, sadness, loneliness. I still don’t cry often, something I really want to be able to do. It’s getting closer.

Perhaps sometime a scientist will draw a greater link between emotional stress and cancer. Perhaps not. I do know this, however: letting go of a lot of my anger has made my life quieter, calmer and gentler. That’s a boon.

I realise now that I learned as a child that others’ emotions could be frightening. As a way of controlling my immediate environment I tried to control them by controlling myself. It doesn’t work. It is better to simply be honest about what we want and need, and let others deal with that however they choose. That takes courage and self-confidence. I lack both, but I am learning, and if I had to endure cancer and a liver transplant as part of this life lesson, I am grateful to both. As I said at the start, it is often the teachers who appear on the surface to be harsh who teach us the most.

*Also see: http://www.cancer.org/cancer/news/studies-no-clear-link-between-stress-and-cancer-returning

Here be dragons

I have no idea how those who have reached somewhere even vaguely near that place where you forgo attachment to the world, where things that happen don’t affect you, have done it. I am not even sure I want to be there.

Spiritually, even emotionally, yes. How wonderful, on the one hand, it must be to just “let things go” and not to struggle and fight. And, yes, much of that fighting ends up with my ego in the vanguard.

But, on the other hand, if everyone just let tyrants do their tyrannical thing, and bullies bully, the world would be a worse off place than it is. Surely?

I am confronted with a situation where arrogance and aggressiveness from someone else have really upset me. Some of it is directed at me, much of it is directed at others. The sad thing is, outside of the power play, I like the person who is doing the bullying. But then, no person is all good, or all bad.

At least, I hope so.

Over the years, partly due to a realisation that anger causes stress and stress is thought to cause inflamation and inflamation cancer, I have taught myself to pick my battles, and walk away from many. I have learned to control a rather smashing temper, and I am far better off for it. From what others say, I have done well.

But inside resides a passionate person. I am also proud (rather childishly proud!) that a silly Facebook quiz revealed my hippie name to be Tempest, the fierce warrior. I sometimes wish I was braver, more ready to fight for good causes. Life has also, however, taught me that it seldom uses black or white, it likes those confusing shades of grey. You have to pick your battles carefully, and not address a situation as if it had easy solutions. Yet, I admire passion in others, and when people call me passionate, I puff up a bit.

it also gets me into trouble.

Oddly, I may sometimes fight fiercely for myself, but it is for others I fight like a she-bear with threatened young.

“Don’t take on other’s fights,” is advice I often hear. It is sincere, it is concerned for my mental and emotional well-being, it is sensible. It speaks well to one side of me, but I am not sure it speaks to the core of me.

There are fights worth fighting. Fighting cancer is one, staying alive; many would say that fighting on others’ behalf is not worthwhile. But, if that was true, what would have happened to the Jews, gays, gypseys and others the Nazis did not kill. What would happen to abused children, women, men, animals and their abusers? To societies (all societies) abused by criminals? What would happen to the world?

I wish I could remember who it was who said, “All it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing”.

I am a journalist. I have based my working life on that saying. There are other journalists who have lived this saying far, far better than I, but we all do our bit. Murder must out.

But, the flipside is that expending personal passion and energy raises stress. I also admire those who let “stuff” pass them by. Yes, we can all try to not sweat the small stuff, but for all the lessons I have learned, sometimes I am not sure whether something is small stuff or big stuff.

Man, I have far, far to go.

The quote is from Edmund Burke