The Highway and the Crater - Failing to Cope With the Absence of Work
When cancer lifts its foot off my neck and I have a chance to catch my breath, I wrestle with: "what am I supposed to do now?" Before my diagnosis, my life was defined by the career goals that I set for myself. For 15 years I worked to become a game designer. For 4 years I worked to become the best teacher I could. When cancer hit and I had to quit my job, I saw for the first time a giant invisible highway of people walking and running together toward "work." I feel like cancer ripped me from this infinite caravan and put me on a narrow, perpendicular dusty road by myself.
I didn't realize how much this shared concept of "we are all working" provided a substantial sense of a community to me. Two people may have separate jobs, totally different goals in life, but they are together on that highway and can share their experiences trying to overcome the obstacles in their way. (How many conversations are started with "what do you do" and built on "how is work going?") Talking with co-workers you like can make a job a blessing, talking with ones you don't like can at least help you feel less alone.
As someone with cancer, I don't have a job and I struggle to find a good purpose other than "keep living." Conversations with those on the working highway are often infrequent and one-sided; either I am telling of my maladies and their treatments or they are describing that now foreign land of work. To talk about work with them, I have to remember events in my past in order to feel the empathy and connection that before came with thoughtless ease. It feels impossible to be part of that community again as things are.
The road that cancer put me on isn't completely desolate - it is shared by other people diagnosed by cancer or serious illnesses. On my online communities I do what I can to make others and myself less lonely on this road - I try to listen to others, encourage them, and share with them my experiences to try to help them on their way. Yet this community is inevitably depressing and doesn't help give that shared purpose that being a part of the walking working horde did.
Most of the time people only realize how interwoven work is to their lives when they retire. When I reflect on things, I gaze into a crater where work was in my life and wonder how it ever got so vast. Work fed my social needs, my need to contribute, my need to grow and improve, and my need to practice self-discipline and so many other things, great and small. How am I ever to fill it again? Without the structure and routine of work, my life has regressed/transcended into having a permanent decadent summer vacation like some 45-year old middle schooler. I imagine to some that sounds like an idyllic situation (it kinda does to me as I write it), but I feel that summer vacations are made sweet because you have to make each day meaningful before you return to school. Without it, it can be a prison.
A co-worker of Bessie's has been diagnosed with a similar cancer and he continues in his demanding job. I wonder at times if I could have remained a teacher, but even during the good times my condition is volatile and I would likely miss many days of school. Before cancer I struggled to stay on top of all the grading, now it would be a disaster. Yet this man who shares my curse continues on through his pain and suffering - why can't I? It is impossible to compare the burdens that we all carry through life, but I think it is vital when you see someone do something extraordinary to ask yourself: "could I do more?" I don't know, but I can't go back to teaching; when I had cancer but had not quit, I felt tremendous guilt for being away from my students for a long period of time.
I don't like ending my posts in a negative way; it is too easy for me to wallow in the bad parts of my situation. Yet I keep coming back to the "what do I do now?" question over and over again and I worry that if I don't try to fill that crater with something challenging and real and meaningful, I will continue on my narrow highway, disconnected and irrelevant to all but an ever-shrinking few.
