Is it too much to ask?
Is it too much to ask?
In a recent Sunday discussion we talked about grief, particularly about how we grieve for the loss of people we have never met, celebrities and public figures who we don’t know, but whose deaths cause many of us to feel profound grief.
Grief is a complex emotion and affects us all differently, but it is something which we all experience in some way. People often talk of grieving as a process, but it is not a linear path, there are twists, turns, surprises and bumps in the road. As a group of women who have all had a breast cancer diagnosis, we were aware that deaths caused by cancer often touched us the most, perhaps reminding us of our own mortality or causing us to think “that could be me”. One of our members said that once we have had a cancer diagnosis our ability to live a carefree life has been taken away forever; thoughts of death may become an everyday part of our lives. We all know that none of us will live forever, but cancer steals away our peace of mind and may leave us in a constant state of worry for whatever life we have left.
‘You’ll beat cancer if you stay positive’. A recent Sunday discussion was on the topic of ‘toxic positivity’ and its impact on our emotional well-being. With just over 200 comments from our members, this discussion hit close to our heart.
Our members have many a time heard the words ‘stay positive’, ‘a positive mindset will breeze you through chemo’, ‘You are so beating cancer’s arse’ ‘If you stay positive, you will get through this’, ‘You caught this early, you’ll be fine’, ‘You’ve SO got this’, ‘If anyone can kick cancer’s arse its you’, ‘You’ve got the better cancer’. However, the reality of how these words make us feel is very far from positive.
What became quickly clear was a sense of how our feelings of fear and sadness due to cancer are minimised by others. We felt we were not allowed to be anxious, sad or fearful. A member said, ‘it shook me to the core’, and another saying ‘it was deeply painful’, when needing to smile whenever her cancer was mentioned. What we almost all agreed on was that the relentless positivity force hindered our ability to process the trauma that we had endured, minimising our emotions to meet the expectation of others, and this we found utterly exhausting and effortful.
Many of us felt that putting on our positivity cloak was a must for others around us as they would not be able to cope. This extended to immediate family, friends, and colleagues. Sometimes, we’ve had to apologise for not ‘coping’, amid not being allowed to grieve the losses we experience due to cancer. There was a sense that we felt less positive whenever we tried to enforce this positivity, and so we’ve ended up being selective in our approach, censoring what we say to whom and pretending everything is fine and allowing ourselves the dishonesty to others when our feelings are not validated. This has meant we’ve lost friends and family members along the way.
The truth is that pretending that we are ok when we are not, is not a helpful line to take. We are not doomed and gloomed, we do have ‘positive’ days and we are hopeful and resilient, we want to survive to the best of our ability, and this is a really delicate point when it comes to secondary breast cancer. But the reality is that our fears can be very real to us. The sadness from the loss to our identity, and the side effects of treatment which linger on for years put us in a vulnerable position and can be limiting. In fact, we are not fighting cancer, but we are fighting the side effects of treatment. We acknowledged that embracing our difficult and upsetting feelings can help us experience a multitude of emotions that can only be beneficial longer term. We’ve learned that suppressing our emotions will backfire, validating them, and addressing them with appropriate tools can lessen the need for the ‘toxic positivity’ which we have found unhelpful.