I am a survivor.

That moment when you remember how your professors radically changed your life...

That moment when you're reminded of the vision you held for your future...

That moment when you realize you're a survivor.

Today is the 16-week anniversary of my total thyroidectomy, and thus my 112th day of being cancer-free.  These anniversaries are largely non-monumentous.  Every few weeks, I take a photo of my scar and post it on Facebook with a caption about which anniversary I've reached.  The photos always garner "likes" and comments, and they're a small and simple way for me to celebrate.  I have also been turning these photos into "covers" for my Facebook profile, after I add to them the statement "I am a survivor."

The fact that I'm a survivor has been a conscious reality since the day I was diagnosed with cancer.  But I have given the title (survivor) little meaningful thought in the past few weeks.  I don't know that I really considered what the word meant beyond the fact that it made a statement about my having battled cancer.  However, something in me shifted tonight as I read those words.

I've been struggling a lot lately with trying to figure out the future.  I realize that working in retail is unsatisfying and impractical for the long-haul.  I want to contribute something to the greater good of mankind--research, teaching, love.  I want to make a difference in the world.  As an INFJ, my heartstrings are always pulled in so many directions.  I read an article recently that said that career options for INFJs are always simultaneously exciting and heartbreaking.  As idealists, the world of possibility is thrilling and produces in us all sorts of fantasies about the future.  However, all of those possibilities are also crippling, because we come to realize that to pursue one pathway is to sacrifice another.  We can't do everything.  And so at once none of the options are appealing any longer because we can't do all of them in one self-designed career (wouldn't that be nice?).  It's frustrating.

So, I've been dealing with all of that INFJ confusion--the appeal and drawbacks of every job out there.  Add on top of this the fact that INFJs often feel misunderstood (and often are misunderstood) when sharing their intuitive insights, so people write off this deep analysis of future options as crazed neuroticism.  The INFJ then packs up all this thought and places it back into the very personal introverted intuitive luggage, and once again starts mulling over the more "conventional" options, because those aren't considered "crazy."

And then I get to throw an autoimmune disease, endocrine disease, MTHFR gene mutation, and histamine intolerance into the mix of my endless thought processes, which does result in a certain amount of crazy as I try to create a game-plan for my future.

The past few weeks I've been revisiting the idea of pursuing a Ph.D., as I think it may be one of the only career paths that affords me the level of freedom and time for contemplation that I'm seeking.  The struggle I have been facing with this idea is what kind of research agenda I would propose in my personal statement.  I want to write something honest and compelling, but to be honest would be to say that I really don't know what I want to do doctoral level research on.  Earlier tonight I read through old personal statements and academic essays, and then found a letter I wrote to my professors when I graduated from Cal Poly.  The letter mostly talks about how their mentorship and guidance is what made me want to become a professor in the first place (over eight years ago), and how I wanted to inspire my future students in the same ways my teachers inspired me.

When I finished reading the letter and closed it on my desktop, the first thing I saw was the cover photo I had posted on my Facebook profile earlier today.  It felt like the "I am a survivor" statement was boring a hole into my heart.  For the first time, those words made me want to cry.  They no longer just meant that I battled cancer, but that who I am in my very essence is a culmination of every event that has ever happened to me, both in the past and moving into the future.  I could easily say "I have hope" or "I have a future," and they would mean the same thing as telling people that I'm a survivor.

Writing this now brings to mind the verse that was a favorite for years and years--the one that all my friends knew I loved, and that caused them to give me knowing glances whenever we read or heard it.  It was my signature verse, for reasons that I won't outline in this post.  But, suffice it to say, the words still hold profound meaning in my heart, and are something I think I need a reminder of today.

Jeremiah 29:11

"'For I know the plans I have for you,' declares the Lord, 'plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future'" (New International Version).

or

"I know the plans I have in mind for you, declares the Lord; they are plans for peace, not disaster, to give you a future filled with hope" (Common English Bible).

I take the GRE in one week.  My prayer is that during the test, these words will be my companion:

I am a survivor.

I have hope.

I have a future.

For You, My Fellow Introverted Idealists, My Fellow Autoimmune Disease-Sufferers

What if I told a new narrative for my life?

Last year in one of my graduate seminars, we read a book by Geraldine Pratt in which she discusses transit lane versus trapped narratives.  Transit lane narratives are the dominant discourses of the most visible populations.  The ones told and retold by the media, in our schools, by way of a constructed cultural consciousness.  The trapped narratives are those of oppressed peoples, that get bypassed for the more "important" narratives--that stay hidden away because they contest our neatly-constructed cultural consciousness.  They would upset the status quo.

And, when I shift the concept of these narratives from macro to micro, I realize that I have designed the same system in my own life--for my personal narrative.  I have an idea of who I am or who I should be, informed by choices I've made over the years, words that people have spoken to me, beliefs I have been trained to believe about myself or have wrongly assumed about myself.  I have been fixated on one narrative that is defined by the woulds and shoulds and supposed tos.  A narrative that is neatly-constructed and deeply embedded in my self-consciousness.

Perhaps the real narrative for my life is trapped.  Or, a narrative for what my like could be is trapped.  All those beliefs I have believed and tales I have been told and assumptions I have assumed--but how many of them are part of His narrative, the meta narrative, and how many of them have become the story of my life simply because it is the same narrative repeated over and over...?

Can I frame a new narrative for myself?

Is there another narrative He wants me to tell?

My narrative for the past five years has been about disease and exhaustion and doctors' visits and medical bills.  It has been isolation and rumination and depression.  It has been giving up on a lot of maybes and possibilities.  The admitting that compromise and sacrifice are necessary evils of living with chronic illnesses.

I cannot rewrite my story.  I am who I am who I am.  I will always have my past experiences and my chronic illnesses and my passions and likes.  But my narrative doesn't need to be dictated by sickness or past experiences.  Illness is my transit lane narrative, but that doesn't have to be my narrative at all.

I don't know how to ride the line between living with a chronic illness and not letting it control me.  It affects a huge part of how I live my life.  But I think that I've for so long wallowed (I'm not sure that's the appropriate word) in the knowledge of my diseases that my every experience and very reality has been shaped by that wallowing.  I don't want to live life that way.

Additionally, before illness more or less came to control my life, I had certain ideas and ideals about what I wanted to do with myself--what I wanted to devote my time and talents to.  Sometimes I wonder if being diagnosed with chronic illnesses wasn't a sort of get out of jail free card--an opportunity to start out on a pathway I had never given myself the room to consider, at least not since childhood.

I'm still figuring out who I am.  What I like and what I'm good at and where my talents and passions will collide.  I'm still learning what it means to be an introvert (more specifically, an INFJ) and a Highly Sensitive Person.  What it means to be a cancer survivor and live each day battling autoimmune disease.  How I can live a healthy and happy life, finding balance between recognizing my limitations and not giving up on dreams.

I want to make a difference in the world, but that dream seems like such an amorphous and ambiguous thing.  I know I want to create, and organize, and contemplate, and help, and connect, and be independent, and embrace my values.  I don't want my work to just be work.  I want it to be my mission.  But I also want to take care of myself while on that mission.  No more grandiose dreams of high-stress overseas work with people.  I just want peace, and beauty, and authenticity.

I don't want to feel constrained by my past experiences or limited by my degrees or jobs or what people have told me about myself or even what I have wrongly or rightly believed about myself.  Can't there be a new narrative?  An emerging trapped narrative?  One that is true and good, but simply buried by more visible story lines?  Or, by ones that are easier to believe or that fit together more neatly as an unfolding narrative "should"?

What if I was brave enough to tell a new story?  To unearth a trapped narrative?  What if my life became something that no one, not even I, ever predicted or envisioned for myself?

I don't know what it would mean to live a trapped rather than a transit lane narrative.  Somehow it seems harder, scarier.  But also richer.  Better.  More beautiful.

And that is what I want.  Richer, better, more beautiful.

God, help me tell my story.