We all want a ‘normal’ life.
But whatever that might mean, when you have been told you have cancer, normality ceases to exist. The only normal thing about cancer is that most of us will get it as part of our evolutionary self-destruction.
After you have endured the ‘slash, poison and burn’ of surgery, chemo and radiotherapy, not to mention the kitchen sink being thrown in with immunotherapy, you might be forgiven for being ‘out of sorts’.
As we try to make sense of it all and adapt our whole way of being, some doctors will tell us that this represents ‘the new normal’.
Well, it doesn’t, it really doesn’t. Your life trajectory is shot to pieces and everything is upended.
Psychologically, cancer takes on a beast-like momentum of its own. It’s brutal and immediate.
Normality gets carried away with the tornado that tears through your life upon diagnosis. Along with the furniture and everything else, ‘normality’ has never been seen since.
A conscious re-conceptualisation of a ‘normal life’ is damn hard.
Cancer rips through normality and it never comes back however well the medics try to package it.
We know hospital professionals mean well and finding the right words for cancer patients must be tough but there has to be a different script and narrative to follow.
Lockdown was the ‘new normal’ for a while and then the old normal did return.
It isn’t like that for cancer. Resetting normality isn’t possible.
Cancer changes everything.
Clearly, there is no way we can get back to normal and we are told it’s about finding out what’s ‘normal’ for us now.
But ‘finding your new normal’ isn’t the way it is.
Cancer is a biographical disruption that explodes your life CV and depending on your expectations for recovery, normality is dismantled.
Everyday is different and there is so much to cope with. For starters your expectations, ambitions and future plans change dramatically. You live with altered circumstances forever.
Then you are confronted with a change to your appearance and a newly acquired disability.
You will no doubt have to adapt to new routines, change your diet and lifestyle and you will always be on the lookout for anything suspicious so you are in a constant state of anxiety.
If that’s not enough to get your head in a spin then you still have to renegotiate your identity, relationships and social roles.
For many it is chaos, for some it is about restoration and for others a quest to get stronger.
Concepts of normality will differ from patient to patient and there are a lot of individual differences. This needs to be recognised by professionals that interact with cancer patients.
Post-diagnosis life might come with a change of expectations and radically altered realities but the ‘new normal’ narrative doesn’t fit and there needs to be a narrative reconstruction.
We really shouldn’t be pressured into adopting a new cloak of normality where one doesn’t exist.
It glosses over the real lived experience of post-diagnosis which is actually a daily act of picking up the pieces and wondering what the hell happened.
Struggling for normality, pursuing normality and biographical repair might be the goal some patients aim for and we have to respect that.
We must accept that ‘normalisation’ is a way of coping, for some. The drive to present an externally normal life is clearly linked to maintaining a social identity – I get it.
But for many others, including me, this doesn’t work. The ‘new normal’ is an unwelcome burden.
Subscribing to a dynamic ‘new normal’ narrative is a pressure I don’t want and I shouldn’t be expected to maintain an illusion of normalcy to let others know how well I’m coping. I am not in the mindset for presenting a ‘normal life’ whatever the cost when my life is not normal.
You can’t find normality in abnormality. Normal really doesn’t exist. As Maple (2020) says,
“Normal” is nothing more than an interpretation of the constructs we have built, not a matter of inherent reality.
For many cancer patients, all we want is to be self-sufficient and to maintain life, health and well-being through our own self-care.
Being safe, being well, being free and being independent is very much something we all take for granted.
Is that normal?
Life isn’t just, life just is. There is no normal. We live out what we are given and play the cards we have.
Doc Holliday probably said it better in the film Tombstone,
There’s no normal life, Wyatt. There’s just life. Now get on with it.