Happiness is hard work
Here's to an easier 2024
It’s New Year's Eve, and I’m looking back on 2023. The hardest year if you look at the chemo, surgery, radiation, fear. The best year if you look at it as a very favorable treatment outcome. It is the same reality, a very different takeaway- and a great opportunity to remind myself that both things can be true - it could have been the hardest year and the greatest victory all at once.
Consistent with this theme, our holiday travel was canceled last week because a big wave of COVID and the stomach flu evaded our household and took us down one by one, like clockwork. We’re not even 100% out of the woods now (which is why I am writing to you in my pajamas at 6pm on New Year’s Eve).
I was tempted to allow it to fit the narrative that, of course, this happens to me. Of course, it was my first family holiday since I finished treatment, and everything was canceled because of illness. Of course, life is more challenging for me.
But I didn’t. I actively reframed it and chose happiness. I chose to prove the story that this was a blessing (which it was) and our family needs nothing more than a cozy staycation (which we did). We actually had one of the best months of our life as a family despite it all.
I was reminded at that moment that we’re always choosing happiness and that the expectation that it just happens to us is so unrealistic especially when life is as hard as ours can be.
It is hard work to find joy and create happiness when you’ve heard the words "You have cancer.” And then you have to actually get up and look at your children in the eyes without completely falling apart. You still have to show up even when you are beyond terrified. That is brave.
I think it’s brave to want to be happy when it’s so much easier to use the evidence where it is plentiful: we are cursed, we are the unluckiest, we are the broken ones.
It’s hard not to feel reluctant to live a full life when we can’t trust our own bodies. It’s hard to open our hearts and love our babies so much when we’re sure we’re about to lose it all. It often feels more compelling to shut down, to pull away, to hide.
Yet we’re here, trying to connect and build a community. Relentlessly trying to make sense of the incomprehensible. Loving our children and people with our whole hearts.
And so what I want to say as we close out 2023 is that I am in awe of us for just trying to be happy while simply trying to survive. May 2024 be a year when feeling joy and happiness comes easily to us.
I’m grateful for each and every one of you.
Happy New Year - to a happy and healthy 2024.
Yours truly,
Marcella
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