The oppression of having to be 'Positive'.

Why, oh why, are people with cancer forced to feel that they have to be positive all the time.  It is as though just one negative thought will wipe out anything positive, whether that positive is from treatment, exercise, eating the right food, meditation and so on.  One negative thought flicks through your mind and it is all undone.  Rubbish.

Living with cancer, at any stage, is difficult enought, but to expect us all to be cheerful all the time ... where these people in the Spanish Inquisition in a former life?  Have a load of sh*t dumped on you AND expect you to be positive about it?  NO.

I had a bad weekend, if no one noticed from one of my other posts (!), but one thing I know is that every now and then I just have to let out the frustration, anger, fear, self-pity and all those other bad feelings or I will explode.  The one thing that I haven't quite mastered yet is to direct the released missile without damaging people, furniture, or more importantly Teddy Bears.  It just has to come out.  Usually I can use a cover story like a weepie movie, or something got in my eye to justify a few tears without dragging others into my mood.  After all it is my mood and I need to deal with it, and to be honest I am just as likely to be annoyed by someone's attempt at empathy as I am to be helped by it.  After all I am the only one who really knows how I feel right now, and right now I don't need to hear anyone say they understand.  That is not to say that in five minutes time saying that they understand how I feel won't be the right thing to say, but right now!

It takes time to learn how to reduce the stress and focus on exactly what I do have at the moment.  To remind myself that right this second I am safe, relatively well and I don't have much pain.  I have a roof over my head, and food and drink, heating, hot and cold running water ... what more do I really need in life?  Therein lies the rub ... life ... that four letter word again which can be tinged with irony, melancholy as well as the fact that I am still living and functioning.  This brings me back to this exact present moment when all is well.