How are you?

The question I get asked most these days is 'how are you?' I understand, it is what I wonder about people too. I wonder what are you thinking about, what makes your soul sing, have you read anything good? Do you feel like you are living an authentic life, what is really hard right now, how is the weather affecting you and what makes you feel alive? You know, how are you? I'm not sure that is exactly what people mean when they ask me; they may mean something more like how are you physically feeling, or are you going to survive?

So here is my answer: even when you have cancer not much changes. Life goes on in all the regular, beautiful, everyday ways. My kids still wake up needing to eat and learn and be parented. Sometimes I can cherish every second and sometimes I'm just hanging in there until I get an hour with no one talking to me. Aaron and I are still married, we still need to connect with each other and pay our bills and do our jobs, we still love each other very much.

Normal things happen: we went to the symphony and my girls got the flu and we fold laundry and do math and watch soccer games and clean out the chicken coop. My sister had a baby on Valentine's Day, I can't wait to hold her, a miraculous reminder of things carrying on just as they should.

I still like to write and post things on instagram and be in nature and talk to my best friends and laugh and find beauty everyday. I'm tired because I'm often not sleeping and also, oh yeah, maybe the cancer, but otherwise, it is life pretty much as normal and I'm doing okay.

And here is also my answer: when you have cancer everything changes. It starts out with your heart being broken. It most likely will be re-broken many times along the way and you have to decide, after you mourn, to pick up from there and move on. It challenges every thought you have ever had about how things are, about how if you do enough, you will succeed, certainly at something as simple and straightforward as keeping yourself healthy.

It makes you look at your very own life and examine every part. Is this really what I want to be doing? Is this how I want to spend my days? Is this how I want to treat people? Is this really important? Important enough to trade my time for?

It makes you wonder, what is this here to teach me? What goodness will come from this?

Cancer makes you say everyday 'I am healing' and at first you only believe it metaphorically. But then with the gift of a magical unicorn lightbeam of a healer and the power of the holy spirit, you realized as you said it two days ago, for the first time, yes, you believe it. You believe it fully, deep in your soul. You are not just going to survive, this is actually healing you.

Cancer makes you wrestle with deciding which of those broken pieces of yourself are worth picking up and salvaging and which needed to be shed off and let go of a long time ago. 

And this too is okay.

So...

(Originally written for facebook) I've got some not awesome news and that is that I have cancer. I haven't been very public about this yet as I wasn't sure until recently where this was headed (and hoping it would just be a little blip) so I wasn't feeling the desire to make it 'facebook public' so to speak. The world feels a little crazy right now and the last thing I would want to do is add to people's feelings of overwhelm or take away from anything else currently going on. Instead my intention is to hopefully increase compassion and connection for whatever is going on in your own life. I tend to have a lot of thoughts about this right now so if you are interested here are some of them.

As it has become apparent this won't be the little blip I hoped, I still debated about keeping this very quiet and asking people not to share but there were two issues with that. The first very practical one is my husband is not a private person and a part of how he lives is being very open. Therefore I want to be somewhat open here too so people who know both of us aren't only hearing things from him and people who I am close to but he isn't aren't left in the dark.

The second issue is that we live in an interesting time of facebook and instagram and all other sorts of social media. Overall truly I love social media - often I think it spreads joy and hope and connection and provides a place to get some empathy or learn about something new, support a cause you are passionate about or heck, even just good suggestions for what to read next.

However, I am getting closer to forty and as I have aged this has become a life truth: hard things happen to everyone. Everyone you know has either recently had or is having or will in the future be having a hard time. This is just a part of life, there aren't any exceptions I have observed, just as I believe joyful things happen to everyone as well, if we can have the eyes to see them.

Now social media doesn't always make it look that way because hard things are often very private, as private or more private than the things that bring us the utmost joy. Here is why: perhaps your hard time has to do with your child or your partner or your sibling. Perhaps it has to do with finances or health issues we find embarrassment around or our childhoods. Maybe it is something you feel shame about so isn't safe to put out there for everyone's input. These are things we can talk to our most inner circle about but they are not things most of us talk about online. Because they aren't just ours to tell and most of the people in our online worlds don't need to be privy to the details. The details cannot make sense outside of a close relationship context or it just simply isn't a safe subject to open up. Maybe we think that because our hard times seem easy compared to others they don't count so we keep quiet. This of course is utter crap, hardness is not a contest and empathy, as a woman I love says, is not a nine piece pie. There is enough to go around. So because of our respect and concern for others involved (including our very own selves) in our hard stories, they often don't show up on social media and we are stuck in a place where it may appear that so few of us are actually ever having hard times.

In fact the hard things can sometimes be so absent from social media that we can sometimes start to think we are the only ones going through struggles or at least the struggles that aren't on the nightly news. We can sometimes even start to feel jealous and angry and resentful of people who look like they have it all together.

So I decided to share as a reminder that whether it is out there on social media or not, if you are having a hard time you are not alone. You are loved. You are cared for. I hope you have people taking good care of you. You are not the only one with shit blowing up everywhere and living with fear and worry alongside any joy and hope. I know you care about things outside yourself and want to change the world to be a better place, no matter how much energy you have to give to that right now or not.

If you are not having a hard time right at this very instant, I hope this will be a reminder to be compassionate to others because we can't be sure of what they have going on. A reminder that while lots of us have good lives, none of us have perfect lives. A reminder to be gracious to others because we are all still learning and stress often causes us to not do things to the standard which we would prefer. To be happy and celebrate as much as possible other's healthy boundaries or joys or celebrations that they do share because who knows what else they have gone through, aside from what you are seeing.

As for me I have appendix cancer (one in a million so likely you haven't heard of it or known anyone with it before.) If you are interested in the more nitty gritty details of that I wrote a post of the history and where things are at currently on my blog: www.leahcolbeck.com  Otherwise I'm super grateful that I know so many people who believe in taking good care of the people around them - whether we know of any hardship they may be having or not because this is what the world needs. I will also say in advance I appreciate all the love and prayers and am so thankful for that.

Photo because I still believe God made this world so beautiful and full of love.