When people ask me what my favorite season is, I always say Summer. The hotter the better for me, I tell them. But that's a lie. It's autumn. I love the leaves changing colors, which in my neck of the woods is quite spectacular. I love cinnamon and pumpkin pies and pears. I love that the whole world is cast in a soft rosy-orange glow, and all the holiday sales start at all the stores.
Which is why on one particularly beautiful autumn day, Husband and I decided to take some of our dogs out for a nice walk. As we rounded the corner coming back towards our house, I was overcome by one of those lovely moments where everything that you hold dear is all in your line of sight. I saw my loving husband that works so hard to make me happy, our charming house that we have fixed up with our own hands, our dogs that never allow our lives to be dull, all on our darling tree-lined street in a friendly and safe neighborhood.
And I just thought, wow... my life sucks.
It's strange to think something you didn't know you thought. After all, it's just me up there in that head of mine, so I can't imagine how something popped up that I was so surprised by. So I pushed it to the back of my mind, writing it off as a random irrational thought, like the times I convince myself the milk is bad even though the expiration date printed right on the jug says it won't go bad for another three days.
But that thought just wouldn't be silenced. My life sucks, my life sucks, it kept coming back and back, louder and louder. And then I thought, how silly it is to lie about being miserable and liking the Fall. Why do I categorically deny the things it is so clear I feel? But the lies help me to feel more like myself, at least on the outside. I want to like the Summer. But I am autumn, I am myself a tree without its leaves. And when the biting winds of November feel like they are blowing through me, it makes sense, because I am shot so full of holes that I am more hole than I am person.
I think for that reason it is in the most joyous moments that I feel the most despair. Because when I look at the wonderful things in my life, I see Cancer, and when I think of all the things I have, I can only think of all the things I've lost. My most precious memories are seen only through cancer's lenses. The most heartbreaking of which is when Husband and I went to the mall and looked at cute little puppies, and when I saw the one that melted my heart, I looked up to Husband and didn't even have to ask. We took our new pup to a small field in front of a nondescript building to play that first night. When I walked through that same field two months later to my first radiation treatment, I thought, it all comes back to cancer eventually.
Then the shame sets in for not being able to be grateful for what I have, then the anger that I have to feel the shame. And after heading downward in this constant spiral for nearly three years, I see now that at the bottom is an all-consuming depression. The leaves that were once vibrant oranges and reds are now brown and slimy, and the warm parts of myself have gone barren and cold. Every morning when I wake up my joints are a little stiffer in response to the weather, a daily reminder that the darkest winter of my life has begun.
