A feeling of depression on reading an account of a writer I admire – a previously wholly well, fit and active professional middle aged woman (sound familiar??) – receive a cancer diagnosis and go through debilitating chemotherapy. 

She said, ‘just walking around the block felt like swimming against a riptide, and I understood what the end of life felt like, that there simply wasn’t enough energy to go another step. Death wasn’t a bad option if you couldn’t eat, go to the bathroom or get off the couch, when you couldn’t put on your skis to shuffle down the track along the river, or make dinner for your kids’. 

I think of my life for the last six years, which has been continuously more or less what she claimed is a worse option than death. Maybe I would have thought the same as her, at the start of my illness when I had only the experience of being well, if I’d been told how I was going to have to live from then on. But since then, I’ve learned that my life is still worth living, even though it’s so much more limited than it was.

‘I couldn’t live like that’, some people tell the seriously chronically ill, I think because they think it’s a compliment. As if they think they’re saying, ‘You’re so strong and amazing’. Not like they’re saying, ‘I’d rather die than live like you’.

‘I’m trying hard to be me, I wrote in my diary, wanting to be normal’, that writer I admire also said. Yes. This life isn’t ‘normal’ to the abled, privileged world. But I’m still me. A non-normative life doesn’t negate my identity. Not being able to do the things I long to do, used to be capable of doing, would be capable of doing except for illness, doesn’t make me not me. I’m not what I do. 

Maybe that’s something you learn when you become chronically ill. And maybe also when you live under any other circumstances that take control from your life. When you don’t have the privilege of agency, which middle class western society assumes all individuals have. Were slaves less themselves because they couldn’t do what they longed to do, what they were capable of doing? Are people today in rich western countries who have to work multiple insecure jobs so they and their family can survive, who don’t have secure, safe housing, who can’t afford to pay for heating or buy enough, let alone good, food, let alone afford the money or time for treats – are they less themselves than people in secure, well enough paid jobs with enough free time and money and health to be able to choose to do things they enjoy?