Things that get us excited and put breast cancer on the back burner: BRiC's Collective Voice

A recent Sunday discussion of ours focused on “Some of the things that get us excited and put breast cancer on the back burner. Have you found something that reignites your joie de vivre?”

Naz started off by saying that she has used work as a distraction to her breast cancer, but that writing grants, publishing papers and supporting her students mainly gives her a “sense of happiness”

Other members could relate to Naz on the issue of work, it distracts, gives them some normality, and by stretching themselves, gives them a sense of accomplishment too. Also, “being around my colleagues was very helpful to me, they were great”. One member is a tattooist, and, once she was allowed to work again post covid restrictions, has found a real buzz about her work, enjoying the creative process and doing what she loves.

A long term project has also helped one member, a project to convert a horsebox into accommodation. The project will allow her and her husband to travel, and afford them adventures, and make memories. This “happy project” gives a sense of accomplishment too, with a long term goal.

Creativity has been a great go-to for many of us, we have taken up art, written poetry, made jewelry, miniature flowers and renovated dolls houses. Activities such as knitting or crochet have proven links with mindfulness and improving depression so it is no surprise that this sort of creative process is something we reach for in various guises. Cancer has helped us push the boundaries of our abilities, and encouraged us to experiment and learn different techniques and skills - given one member a “self confidence I never had before”. We feel that sense of accomplishment again, and are surprised and pleased by it as many of these activities were initially taken up to distract us from our dark thoughts when we were on active treatment. We have found we want to carry on with them because of the joy they give us, in the process and the end result.

Being outside in nature was another common theme for us, how being outside helps us still our minds, looking at the space around us, the countryside, the colours, the expanse of space. Nature, animals, the night sky, camping and being with friends around an open fire makes us happy, helps us feel calm and chases away anxiety while we are in the moment. It allows time to reflect and get motivated by our own thoughts and theories.

We exercise too, if we are able to within our physical limitations: yoga, horse riding, dressage, running, long hikes, exercise classes at the gym. Setting an exercise goal, and hitting it gives us a natural endorphin high, and keeps us challenging ourselves. Or just having a dance to our favourite playlist!

For some members, they are still searching for something that “clicks”. Reading a good book can provide escapism, but if our minds are wandering then we may not remember what we read. Sewing and yoga can give some temporary distraction but may not fully “excite or engage”. Our concentration and focus may have gone and anxiety has replaced it, we may struggle to look forward to events that gave us a joie de vivre before cancer, and that can block us from those activities that may have excited us before.

However, we should be mindful of not using whatever gives us joy and excitement to help us avoid thinking about our breast cancer. It is healthier for our minds to not suppress our emotions, but give them the attention they deserve and when they deserve it. We are aware of pushing cancer to one side with the things we enjoy doing, but this can only be temporary and the darkness can return. We have to learn to live with the darkness we may sometimes fear and learn what we can do to excite us, what makes us smile and the world seem a little brighter.

Weekly Discussion Summary ~ Happiness

'There is a crack, a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in.' Leonard Cohen.

Happiness.

Hard to define, so elusive, what is happiness and how can we find it?

How do we know when we are happy?

Our weekly discussion looked at being happy in the context of our breast cancer diagnosis.

Happiness may be fleeting, but it can appear at unexpected moments as an appreciation of the small simple things in life. Often, unhappiness is easier to conceptualise than happiness: we know what makes us miserable and sad but working out what makes us happy isn't so easy.

Perhaps happiness comes with embracing whatever is happening, not wishing things were different, and not trying to isolate or compartmentalise our emotions. Our experience often falls short of our expectations, and our ability as human beings to ruminate on the past, and to wish our lives away hoping and dreaming for a particular future, may contribute to feelings of discontentment and disappointment.

As we talked about happiness, we struggled with definitions and how happiness relates to contentment and joy. Some of us were able to list things that we enjoy, that make us happy. Many of us find we no longer fret about issues that used to bug us, and we appreciate things more. We have happy times, happy moments, happy events, but we aren’t sure whether this makes us generally happy. Some women mourned the loss of happiness, which they felt had disappeared following their breast cancer diagnosis. Others felt ashamed that they don’t feel happy, when surviving cancer ‘should’ lead them to make the most of every moment of every day. Many agreed that happiness isn’t something that can exist in every moment, but that finding something to be happy about every day is usually possible. Gratitude and appreciation help. For many, their moments of happiness are clouded with negative feelings – fear, sadness, disappointment, anger. Happiness is spoiled forever because of their diagnosis.

We may have a heightened sense of gratitude, and perhaps we feel everything more intensely because of our experience. We’d still prefer never to have had cancer though.

A cancer diagnosis is devastating in so many ways, and for lots of us, we now believe that when things are going well we are lining ourselves up for something to go wrong sooner or later. This may be because our cancer diagnosis came as such a shock. It is always traumatic, whatever our age or circumstances. It always interrupts our lives, as treatment necessarily makes us stop. When we return, we are different. This is difficult to embrace and so happiness eludes us. Many women expressed a sense of having lost that carefree happiness they once had, but if we are lucky it can be replaced with a sense of inner peace, with deeper relationships (for some of us, facing our mortality makes us braver in telling those we love how much we love and appreciate them) and an acceptance that if our time on earth is to be cut short, then we may as well get on with living our lives our way.

Living in harmony with our values, and having a strong sense of who we are, being true to ourselves, appears to be key to happiness for many women. Perhaps happiness is linked with who we are and what we strive for, our goals, and having a life with purpose and meaning. Our society has certain expectations these days and for many women, cancer means they want or have to step off the treadmill of modern life and find a new way of living. This is particularly true of women with a secondary diagnosis, for whom treatment is lifelong. Our group is for members with both secondary and primary diagnoses. For our secondary women, the promise of tomorrow is even more fragile and they may become more adept at living in the moment. Gone are the thoughts of ‘I’ll be happy when’ (I'm thinner, I have a new car, we go on holiday, I get a new job,…’) and these are replaced with finding happy moments to treasure each and every day. Long term planning is no longer an option and many happy times are tinged with sadness. Finding happiness for these women is hard work, but they do find it, every day.

If each of us can find our own way to be happy, and not worry about what others expect of us or what society dictates, then we may have a chance at living happily. This could mean slowing down, or packing in as much as possible. It may mean family, travel, meaningful work, helping others. Perhaps resilience means coping with adversity with a smile, and that smile leads to happy times. We all acknowledge that in order to feel happy we also have to feel sad, and all of us know how it feels to be sad. This gives us a great capacity for joy, and ultimately for happiness. As one of our women succinctly put it, we are happy to be alive!

If you are a woman living in the UK with a breast cancer diagnosis and you would like to join our private group please message via our facebook page 
https://www.facebook.com/resilienceinbreastcancer/

#ResilienceDiscussion

Weekly Discussion Summary ~ Finding Happiness

We shared the many ways we had learned to find joy and laughter in the small things that make up our daily lives. For many of us this included spending less energy on work and making space in our busy lives to relax and do what is truly important to us, including music, art, dancing, travelling, walking and writing. Many of us valued nature and being outside and described noticing the beauty that surrounds us, the birds singing, gazing at the moon and stars, the sight of a robin on a window ledge. What stood out most from the discussion was the value we place on 'experience', on 'making memories' over 'material things' and the importance of our relationships.

Families, partners, friends, children, grandchildren, pets - it emerged that it is these relationships which are at the heart of our identities and the core of how we experience happiness. We shared the importance of being with those we hold dear, with a profound appreciation for our loved ones as a result of what we've discovered, although if we experience love more deeply, we also experience grief for those we miss, perhaps more acutely too.

We challenge the notion that cancer is a 'gift' because of the intense suffering and distress it causes, especially for those living with secondary breast cancer and long term side effects of treatment. However, we do believe that it is through our extraordinary resilience and strength as human beings that we take from, and learn from the trauma that we experience as a result of our diagnosis. It is this which we can take forward to develop a greater appreciation for life. The gratitude which we feel, Naz explained, is an after effect of trauma that we are inevitably left with, and through practice we can sustain this gratitude, otherwise, like the many sweet things in life, it can disappear.

Some of us described how we had lost the ability to laugh as a result of our diagnosis and treatment, whereas others had found humour, including a 'dark' humour at some of the indignities that we experience, to be a vital means of coping and experiencing happiness.

Naz told us that evidence shows that gratitude and grit come from flexibility and sensitivity, from pain and the will to survive, not from 'toughness' and being 'hard' but the will to sustain along this path we call life and the will to embrace our vulnerability with tears.

Many thanks to the wonderful Sally for allowing us to use her stunning photograph of a winter sunrise.

#ResilienceDiscussion