Looking for solid ground by Ruth Neuwald Falcon

“I am fighting feeling totally grim,” my friend Rebecca wrote in an email this morning. “It sort of feels to me like the beginning of the pandemic. I know it is going to be bad, but don’t know yet how bad. It is the sense of life being totally changed, and not for the good.”

Nine years ago I got a cancer diagnosis. During the ultrasound, the radiologist pointed to the anomaly on the screen. “You have breast cancer,” she said briskly. “It’s not going to kill you.”

It’s a one-way door, a cancer diagnosis. You have no choice about walking through it and once you do, there is no way back. You will never be the same person as you were before.

As I sat on my bathroom floor and wept, it came to me that while I had no choice about going through that door, I could make some choices about how I was going to deal with it. Who I was going to be. I’d been tossed instantaneously out of the world I’d known into a new and frightening foreign territory, one I had never wanted to visit. Even carrying the radiologist’s words with me, I was terrified and unmoored. But I was not, I decided, going to fall apart, which isn’t the same as not crying. I would do my best to meet what had to be met with some kind of grace and bravery.

But there was no need to be ashamed of tears, for tears bore witness that a man had the greatest of courage, the courage to suffer. — Viktor Frankl

I’m trying to dig down into myself the same way now. There is no one telling us that what is to come won’t be the death of our democracy. There is no one to give us a reassuring prognosis. Person and planet will be harmed in ways we can’t yet fully fathom or predict.

I’ve been struggling to write this post for days, hoping that some way forward would reveal itself. But all I have to share right now is a piece of my process and the awareness that I don’t want to live in a black hole of trauma and suffering. I know I can’t remain in the kind of distress that I’ve been in since waking up on November 6. The intention is clear but I haven’t yet found solid ground within myself on which to stand.

When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves. — Viktor Frankl