June 26-June 27, 2024
You know we joke, and sometimes we yell that we were never asked to be put on this earth. And it’s true, but here I am, sitting on this kitchen table, staring through the window to my left, fog over the water with faded mountains in the background, with these canonic city buildings in my foreground—it’s a movie; I’m living in the reels that the largely angsty elementary school Hamidah used to dream about.
I look at this insane view, with my health, and not only that, amid the chosen “chaos,” the palatable, tasteful business, I even get the space to think. I get the chance to just be. And I can’t help but feel gratitude, albeit after some prompting. It’s gratitude, maybe performative to the soul, and it’s layered with guilt and confusion. This gratitude, it’s some fake virtue that maybe I’ve just gotten really good at expressing; that guilt-trip-turned-gratitude virtue. Our holy book tells us time and time again to embody it, feel it. I remember it anachronistically: it’s no longer my saving grace, it’s my dues.
I didn’t choose to live, but I got the chance to live, and the blessing to be alive. In goodness and bad, I didn’t choose to live like this. And with that, I can’t help but feel shame that I care so much about the person I’ll be. For the sake of this post making me out to be less selfish than I am, I’ll say that, one day, I want to be someone. And sometimes this makes me unfoundedly not okay–a little stressed even. I'm not sure where this stems from. Maybe it’s some nominative determinism, after all, my name means praiseworthy. I squirm, but my dad gave it to me for a reason. His first kid, his only daughter. I’m named after my late grandma: I never got to meet her.
Stressed? Why? I want to be someone. Once upon a time, this meant that validation or a lack of it was the end of it all or the start of it. Now, it’s a propellant, a boost to a fire or at the low points, the small, barely-alive flame. The change? Part of me thinks that, now, what they say has less weight—I have a new panel to impress. And my scores are coming out okay. Satisfactory. After all, I feel okay. But that’s sad, shouldn’t it all come from within? Intrinsicity is the good virtue.
Anyhow, I came across this story of this otherwise healthy man who was diagnosed with cancer. I cried. My face is dried with some quick tears while I write the first draft of this—lightly edited from the office a day later.
It’s very sad when people are forced to reckon with their death when an image of them being okay is so clear: their parents are a mirror and in it they see a reflection of themselves in old age, but it will only ever be an image; when women realize they likely won’t be able to birth the kids they dreamt of; and people with aspirations, like me and you, with dreams and potential realize that that's all their plans will ever be.
I find it interesting that after sadness and sometimes apathy, I get this wave of energy, like I could do something about this. The same person who couldn’t start a fire with raw wood when it came down to it and would struggle to pitch a tent: the girl who does survival poorly. I’m the one who could make the clinical trial system more effective or uproot my young career and just learn all there is to know about cancer biology—we stay skeptical: but to some extent, I believe it.
But the problem is, and I think it’s a problem, that I don’t just sit in the reality of what it is to live terminally right now. And that’s not good because if I don’t; it makes me naive, righteous, inhuman. Like this man can’t be the accelerant to my saviorship, the motivational means to saving everyone. Even if I could, if that man doesn't survive, all this energy and inspiration won’t be something he’ll benefit from. He’d be gone—but I really, really hope he won’t be anytime soon. And so I don’t know how to fix that, what I think is broken in me, and maybe in others, in my life, where everything, all that we work on, it’s all so removed.
But this was just another entry of questions to be answered and problems to solve. So we’ll have to see what I come up with, and more importantly what I do about it.