It isn’t that I was having a particularly bad day. I wasn’t throwing up–like I’d done the last two Fridays and Saturdays. I wasn’t as tired as I’d been the day before, when I’d had to take two different naps. There was no pain to address. I just felt generally icky. And generally tired.

When my mom and my best friend asked how I was feeling, I could report on that, and they both responded with something along the lines of, “Oh good! Glad it’s not so bad today.”

Here’s the thing, though. It didn’t feel good. I could recognize that it was better than some other days, but I was tired, and I was tired of being tired and feeling sick. I just wanted a day where I picked what I would eat based on what I wanted rather than what wouldn’t make me feel even worse. I wanted to want to sit at my desk and work, and I didn’t. I knew I had nothing concrete to complain about…but the constantness of feeling bad weighed heavily that day, and as David and I went to bed that night, we talked a little about it.

And we talked about happy endings. Maybe this is going to sound strange, LOL, but bear with me.

A friend sent me a book called 50 Days of Hope: Daily Inspiration for Your Journey through Cancer by Lynn Eib. This is a truly beautiful little book that I absolutely love. In it, Lynn tells about her own cancer diagnosis when she was only 36, and how she kept running into people who wanted to tell her all about other people with cancer…many of whom died. She learned to interrupt them and ask, “Does this story have a happy ending? Because if not, I don’t want to hear it.”

I love that–it made me grin when I read it. It’s something I’ve observed a lot in the Type 1 Diabetes community as well, that as soon as a child is diagnosed, people want to tell stories about this or that person they knew who died of complications…and that is SO NOT HELPFUL. When you hear a teen gets their license, the first thing you say shouldn’t be, “So-and-so was killed in an accident on their very first solo drive,” right? That’s not helpful. Obviously bad things happen to people, but those don’t need to be the stories we dwell on constantly. Let’s instead tell stories of people being victorious, of people being successful, of people defying the odds, doing great things, finding healing.

And yet…I’ve noticed something else as the reality of cancer treatments stretches out day after day.

Sometimes, happy endings feel pretty mocking…when you’re in the midst of the rocky middle.

I’ve heard countless stories during this time, all meant to be encouraging, of people who “weren’t sick a day of treatment” or who “didn’t miss a day of work.” Now, at the outset, before I’d gotten started, I loved these stories. These were the happy endings I wanted to hear about! This was the hope I wanted to cling to!

But…

But my reality looks different, which I discovered as I went. I am sick. I am tired. If I had a traditional job, I’d be missing some days, or at least some hours. Maybe “many people never even get sick,” but I’m one of the ones who has, and after hanging over the toilet, those stories of other people who didn’t aren’t so encouraging anymore.

Here’s the funny thing, though. It isn’t that they’re discouraging or that I feel jealous of their experience. It’s that I feel a strange sort of shame, like I’m not doing it right. Now, I know intellectually this is silly. But it’s a real thing we experience sometimes, isn’t it? We feel as though we ought to have been able to do something to make it that way instead of this way. We feel like if they could do it without missing a day of work, then we ought to have been able to manage it too, and we’re somehow falling short. We’re a disappointment. We’re a failure. We feel as though we ought to have chosen something different, when the fact is that we don’t always get to choose. 

We feel as though people are judging us as weak. Even though we know they (probably) aren’t, the thought is still there. I’m not “doing cancer” as well as she did. I’m not as tough. I’m not as strong. I’m not as able.

In those moments, other people’s stories, other people’s happy endings aren’t necessarily what we need to hear.

There is a happy ending on the horizon–I 100% believe that. But right now? Right now, I’m not in that part of the book. We’re still in the middle of the story, and sometimes I love just looking at it like a writer. Because then I can see that my inciting incident has to lead to some twists and turns. It has to include dark moments and wrestling with lies. It has to feel sometimes like “all is lost.” It has to, because those are the elements of a good story…and good stories borrow their elements from real life.

It has to have those negative things, because life does. And because the beautiful moments, the wins, the victories, the climaxes are only amazing because of the dark places.

Lynn Eib mused in her wonderful little book that she’d never met anyone who took their diagnosis totally in stride and didn’t experience fear or denial or get upset, at least a little. Well, I can honestly say that my diagnosis had none of those things. Because, I said, I’m a novelist. I’d already explored all the different plot options. I’d played them all out like a story in my mind, so when I got the news, I seriously thought, “Okay, Lord. This is the story you’re writing for me then. Okay. Let’s do it.”

And it still feels that way. I’m not afraid or depressed or defeated. But you know what…that doesn’t mean I get to skip to the happy ending, either. I’m still in the midst of it, and the midst involves some not-pleasant parts. I would have loved to be one of “those people” who bypassed some of these side-effects, but I’m not. There’s no shame in that, no weakness, no regret. Right now, I’m living through the rocky middle. It isn’t fun, and I don’t like doing it.

But I know it’s what leads me to the place I want to end up. I know that my role through it is to live it well and live it with God and live it with hope. My role is to know that even when it isn’t easy, there’s no shame in it being hard.

It’s so easy to compare our stories to other peoples’, both those who have it worse and those who have it better. But their story isn’t ours. Today, for that matter, is neither yesterday nor tomorrow. We only have our own stories, and we only have now. So let’s live them in the way God gives them to us. Knowing that tomorrow the page will turn, and even though we may not be able to anticipate how or when or where…God is still leading us toward that happy ending of each ordeal. All we have to do is walk it out.

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