Getting Back to Normal

Do you ever just want things to go back to the way they were? Before that hard thing happened, before your world was rocked, before everything fell apart?

Me too.

June 25, 2015 was a day of joy and celebration, smiles and laughter, hope and relief. I beamed as I sat in that chemo chair for the very last time, surrounded by a dozen friends and family members. With a huge smile on my face, I rang that bell to signal the end of a long three months. The hardest part was over. I was one giant leap closer to returning to my normal life –  the one I was living before I answered that phone call in February. The sound of that bell held so much hope, but hope where I soon realized it should never have been placed.

What didn’t cross my mind in that moment was that the next few weeks could be even harder than these past three months. Surely nothing could be more physically or emotionally painful than what I’d just walked through. It wasn’t long before I began to realize that I had built up so many expectations in my mind of what I thought life would be like after I finally made it through chemo. Just as we all can so easily be tempted to do leading up to the wedding day, the graduation day, or the day the baby will be born, I realized I had painted a picture in my mind of how I expected my life would look after that moment. And of course I didn’t even realize this until the heaviness of those unmet expectations began to smother me.

Without having to plan around chemo treatments and sick weekends, our days began to be filled with less cancer and more of the things that we enjoyed. I found myself looking forward to mundane tasks like doing laundry and going grocery shopping, simply because I felt good enough to do them whenever I wanted. We celebrated friends’ weddings, went on a cruise, and began building our first house. From the outside, things looked as if they were finally coming together for us. Those next few weeks looked a lot more like the newlywed life we’d envisioned. But on the inside, I began to crumble. 

I believed that I was well on my way to what I had wanted more than anything since hearing the word “cancer” for the first time –  for things to return to normal.

To be able to return to my life as I’d imagined it would be. To be finished with this cancer chapter and put it behind me.

But as life was moving on in the ways I hoped it would, I felt even more desperate and afraid. Chemo had become a security blanket of sorts to me, and without it I felt vulnerable and insecure. I would cry for reasons I couldn’t put words to and I felt like I was drowning most days. With chemo behind me, the mastectomy quickly took this newly vacated space in the forefront of my mind. Once it hit me that this surgery was only a few weeks away, I became fearful, sad, and oftentimes angry – angry that this was now stealing away my normal life that I’d just fought so hard to get back. 

And that’s when I realized that I had done it again. I had placed my hope somewhere it was never meant be placed. In a picture of a life that looked the way I expected it should, the way it was before. I forgot that I was never promised normal. None of us are. No one promised me that once I made it through the hard things that I could go back to the way things once were. But what I am promised is that there is going to be something new. And that new thing is good, even if it looks absolutely nothing like what I expected.

Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland. 

Isaiah 43:18-19

My life will always look different than what I thought it would, but I can still choose to live it fully and with joy. And at the same time, I can wrestle with my feelings. I can mourn the loss of the things I had hoped for, and it’s ok to do that. I didn’t wrestle well with those emotions four years ago because I chose not to wrestle at all. I tried to stuff the disappointment, sadness, and anger because I felt guilty for feeling that way. But numbing or stuffing only prolongs the pain. It’s only when we get honest about our feelings and let Jesus in that he can meet us there with that peace that we are longing for. 

Instead of a step closer back to the girl I once was, I now celebrate June 25th as a step further into to that new thing God is still doing in me. Instead of clinging to what once was and grasping my way back to normal, I celebrate taking a step towards surrender and embracing what God has for me next.