Waiting Room

“The shortest distance between two people is imagination”
– Glennon Doyle

 

When I heard this quote about empathy I felt its truth inside me like a vibration. At the moment I have a vague preoccupation with reading human interest stories of struggle. Infertility, disability, grief… It can sound kind of sick and voyeuristic when I try to explain how it makes me feel a little better. I don’t mean that it makes me feel better because I think, “Oh, phew, you know, there are other people worse off than me, I am doing okay.” I think I just mean, it makes me feel less alone. It reassures me that this life is an unpredictable shitshow and you never know when your own personal channel is going to throw static and fuzz all over a previously clear picture. Because what makes me feel alone is the thought that although what I am going through is likely to affect so many people I know, right now none of them have experienced it. They don’t know, and they don’t have to know, and I am sure they feel relieved that they don’t have to. I know I would. So it is lonely. But I read these stories and I realize, so many of us are finding our way through our own static. There are countless ways that our lives detour and twist that we could never predict.

Maybe this loneliness is what gave me such a strong reaction to the radiation waiting room. God, I hated that place. First having to walk through all the seated patients, waiting. Get changed into your awful shorts and then have to find a chair and avoid any eye contact at all costs. I felt like a complete freak. Every single other person in there was old. Grey haired. Bald men. It felt like they all looked at me and wondered what the heck I was doing there, and thought, “Gee, she is bloody unlucky.” It highlighted the fact that although we all were there because of cancer, at least these other old people got to have plenty of their lives first. One day there was this other young lady, probably my age, sitting there, and she was employing my exact strategy which was to read a book and thus avoid any eye contact or unwanted interaction. I was so desperate to talk to her and connect I just about gave her a hug and I introduced myself and she probably thought (correctly) that I was a real weirdo. And I never saw her again. But thanks, Lisa, for making me feel less alone for that one day.

The thing about connecting to people who experience different kinds of struggles and adversity is that you can’t compare your suffering.  I get intimidated by support groups for my disease because someone will share these books that they are reading and I think, “Shit. I should be reading books. Why am I not reading books about how to cure yourself with diet? Now they will get better and I won’t and it will be my fault because I didn’t read the books.” I know, super rational. Reading and learning about how other people experience adversity reminds me that we each have a journey to travel. There is no right way to cope. That’s mostly why I am writing this. People share their story after they have overcome the struggle, and it becomes a success story where they only share the high points, the things that helped them, the strategies that worked. And on some level that’s inspiring but when you’re in the pit, it makes you feel worse. You think, I am doing it wrong. I should be positive. I need to be positive. I should, I should, I should… And I wish someone would share the story of how, now they are better but some days they felt like utter garbage and wanted to cry litres of tears and watch trashy mindless television. Because I think that’s probably the truth. A journey like this can’t be a highlight reel. It is moments where you feel pure joy when your son giggles like a loon while you kiss his tummy. It is ugly-crying in the shower before you have to get out and dress your strange body and make a lunchbox. It is breathing in the forest and thinking, of course the Universe is created by Love. It is forcing yourself to eat porridge while you want to just put your head on the table and give in. It is wearing lipstick when the only place you have to go is an appointment where people will see your bum. Again. It is friends who hold your hand and make you lunch and watch Netflix with you.

I think empathy starts with vulnerability. When we hear an awful truth about someone, we might say, “Gosh I can’t even imagine what it is like to go through that.” I suggest, you can imagine. But you might not want to because it is really hard to open your heart up to that kind of hurting. Maybe when we truly empathise we make ourselves vulnerable to feeling a tiny part of someone else’s pain. That’s hard. But it is also a gift to that person’s pain. A gift to set down by their aloneness, that says, I’m here too. I’m giving you the gift of my imagination, so that I can share your hurt and be here in it. I’ll be here for your pain and I’ll tell you my pain too. We are different, but we are together. At the heart of it, I think sharing our stories makes us feel less alone. On my worst days finding a story about someone else saves me for a minute. I am sharing mine because it might be a saving minute for someone else.