Anger…

The theme continues for me….. when I am feeling low or vulnerable I tend to subconsciously reach to anger. It drives my thinking and almost possess me and my cognitive ability to exist. I create conversations in my head that I want to have with people who have wronged me, people who I feel need to know how I feel about them, and people who have no idea what it is like to have cancer. The latter group of people I understand (how can you know until it happens to you?), so I leave them alone. I was once in that group myself. I wish now I had taken more time to observe what was going on outside of my ‘It’ll never happen to me’ bubble and actually make an effort to turn my eyes towards planet cancer and look properly. I’m sorry that I was too scared and too anxious to do that now.

Like it or not, I feel the burning heat of anger and it needs a platform. So I have to assist. I now tread a very fine line between being very very real and letting it out with no consideration to my audience, or finding a place for it to be where it gets it’s 15 minutes of fame without the catastrophic outcome. This is really bloody hard because as I have already shared with you, I crave internal congruence and it’s rewards.

What would you do with this anger? I try and find the compromise. I do not want to spend time nor waste energy reciting conversations with people I do not want in my life. That snaps me out of fantasizing and back into the state where I actually exist. I am reminded by the words ‘It takes more energy to hate than to love’, hate has a shorter shelf life than love that is for sure. Anyone having chemo will tell you how pointless it is to use up what energy you have on pointless inconspicuous people who have hurt or judged you. I share with my clients – that you cannot control what others think of you only how you react to that. A powerful method of controlling your mind and what it allows in. I don’t always get this right but I try bloody hard to and that is what I work with now. Please try the same. I am not telling you to ignore these feelings of anger. They are there for a reason. They’re borne from a place of pain and they need addressing.

Someone once argued with me that there was no way we were who we are today because of all of our yesterday’s. This person could not connect her past to her present version of herself. She could not accept that all of us have evolved to this point as a result of our relationships, experiences, trauma, adversity, joy, triumph, accomplishments, rejections, grief, gains and losses that had been gathered along the way. Now, I am no Freud or Aristotle, but come on??!! How else have we got to this point right now without the backdrop of your life effecting you? What do you think?

“We are products of our past, but we don’t have to be prisoners of it” – Rick Warren

This is probably another reason I do what I do for a living. I see and feel the personal benefit of peeling back the layers of your life, and exploring, without judgement, what lies beneath. It’ll be ugly. It’ll hurt like crazy and it will make you feel like you have been electrocuted. But it will make you YOU. It’ll make you whole and will equip you with a way of living with yourself and your pain, or anger, or whatever emotion facilitates you.

A cancer diagnosis not only brings graphic images of diseased tissue and pathology reports full of grades, stages, prognosis; it also transports you into a hemisphere of self-exploration, analysis and profound thinking.

I have a lot of time to do this now and actually feel very grateful for this. It’s hard to stop and look behind you and see what is there. But I want to make the most of my time here now and need to put my energy into making something good and worthwhile come from these months. Months ahead of me where anything could happen, get found, go wrong, and go my way. I have got to do this head on. I have to get to the other side of this and find a more awakened version of myself ready to take on what the next chapter of my life has ready for me.