Friday, 26 May 2023.
When one person says of another, ‘they’re in denial’, I’m not entirely sure I know what that means. The perception-reality of the speaker differs from the perception-reality of the person about whom they’re speaking, I suppose. ‘I understand their reality better than they do’, perhaps. But isn’t that a little arrogant?
Although it must be true that the Oncologist’s words ‘I don’t think we can cure you’ — unfortunately I lost my voice recorder of that interview before I transcribed it, but I’m sure she said it twice — must have hit me hard, I don’t feel that they’ve hit me hard and I don’t think I’m in denial. I’m certainly ‘in’ something. Numb, maybe. I haven’t written a word since the 13th, not done any exercise on my trike, drunk too much alcohol. But absence of addressing something isn’t the same as denying that thing is there. Because sometimes we have to adjust to stuff. Sometimes life hits us hard and we adjust immediately, the sudden death of a spouse, unexpected failures, the arrival through the post of the divorce absolute. ‘I don’t think we can cure you’ is a statement, not an event, so has to be processed. Adjusted to a few millimetres at a time, filtering through the layers of consciousness into the substrates of thought and feeling.
And then, in its totality, it can be addressed.
For instance, I started this blog post on the 26th, it stopped, not knowingly, and am finishing it off a week later retrospectively.
And I am in denial.
I’m in denial of her death sentence.
Maybe she can’t fix me. But what if I can? Fix myself. Not instead of, but with medical science, as well as. My favourite phrase: And not Or.
With my mind.
Pretty high stakes if I get it wrong. Right?
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