Overcoming What?

As caregivers, can we truly talk about fighting against a disease or an emotion? Often, we hear or see posters using this term in the context of battling autism, cystic fibrosis, cancer, or diabetes. On a smaller scale, we hear it in speeches addressing fears or loneliness.

Does this warrior-like language not contribute to a dichotomous view of the world, dividing the strong and the weak, the winners and the losers, the survivors and the deceased? Can such rhetoric imprison illness or emotion in a binary narrative, where those who succumb are perceived as having fought poorly?

It would imply that courage can be measured, endurance quantified, and that death, in the most severe cases, represents failure. The inability to overcome one’s fears or loneliness would then be solely attributed to the individual, without considering their context, history, and what their symptom reveals. For example, must cancer or diabetes only be perceived as a war against an external adversary seeking to annihilate the patient? Could it also represent a part of oneself that has gone astray, a defect within oneself?

Naturally, this does not mean one should submit to it, but it is important to view this transformation for what it is: a brutal upheaval that requires reevaluation. The real question would be to think of the symptom as something that does not define the person in their entirety, but as a testimony, a call initiating questioning. It would then be a matter of knowing how to coexist with this part of oneself in imbalance while continuing to move forward.

Are illness or emotion immutable, or can health and well-being be reimagined otherwise? Not as a return to the previous state, but as a newfound serenity, a capacity to face uncertainty without being entirely defined by it. Health then becomes a way of being, a balance that does not depend on organic or emotional perfection but on the calmness of the mind and faith in the future, or at least giving meaning to something that sometimes appears abruptly in our lives.

Illness often represents to our patient a defect of something, a sudden rupture in the natural course of events, a crack in our daily sense of security. It destroys our illusion of constancy and confronts us with a reality that sometimes defies initial logic.

However, at the heart of what may seem like absurdity, there lies a freedom: the freedom to determine how to live with this new reality, to understand it in order to move forward. These trials and upheavals do not define us. It is essential to delve into the details of life, to linger on those suspended moments where everything changes silently. After the collapse, one learns to walk towards oneself again, sometimes with the slowness of those who relearn or discover something intimate to come out stronger. Thus, without being a victory, it becomes part of an affirmed and meaningful life story.