This week we’ve been blessed with many new WWGN members, mostly due to the guest post I wrote for Cure Magazine.
(Right now the iconic Girl Scout song: “Make new friends and keep the old, one is silver and the other’s gold,” is playing in my head.
Because not everyone has been here from the very beginning, I though I’d reintroduce a blog post I wrote a while back. This post is about cancer anger and it is the reason I was originally contacted by Cure Magazine and ended up being quoted in an article on anger. It’s definitely one of my favorites because it’s resonated with so many people:
Coping With Cancer Anger
Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. But anger is like fire. It burns it all clean. Maya Angelou
The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines an emotion as “a conscious mental reaction (as anger or fear) subjectively experienced as strong feeling usually directed toward a specific object and typically accompanied by physiological and behavioral changes in the body.” Notice there is no value judgment as to the negativity or positivity of our emotions. They are simply reactions to friends, family, medical professionals and cancer itself.
The truth is we often consider anger to be a negative and try to avoid it at all costs. The social message is loud and clear: Don’t overreact, don’t yell, don’t curse, don’t scream, and don’t ever be impolite. Hold it in at all cost. But how do we cope with cancer anger?
As a cancer survivor, I remember a lot to be angry about. Although I never wondered “why me,” I did feel anger about changes to my body, loneliness, and having to deal with past emotional traumas stirred up by cancer. I was especially angry when a year had passed since my diagnosis and I was not yet “over” cancer.
I also remember being really angry at the people who wanted to move on and forget about my cancer before I was ready to do the same. I felt alone, abandoned and unheard. As my anger increased, it got too big to share with those same people. The only thing that saved me was being able to voice my anger to my oncology therapist, who encouraged me to curse, yell and be impolite. I know it is only due to her being there for me that I was able to work through my cancer anger and get to a better place in those relationships.
The more I write and speak with you, the more I value our connection. We get each other. Thank you for that from the bottom of my heart.
Survival > Existence,
Debbie
Image courtesy of Michał Koralewski
Where We Go Now 