Tomorrow, and then the next day, and then the day after that.
(CW: cancer stuff)
One of the worst things about modern social media is the damn algorithms that ensure that people will posts out of order and out of context, or not see some of them at all. It basically makes it impossible to politely set boundaries like "please don't tell me I'm almost done with this, and also please no advice," without repeating it to every single person who does so.
Which gets exhausting.
Social media is just exhausting overall. I want to know what my friends are up to, in an orderly and organized fashion. I'm cool if you want to also sell me some tennis shoes, but the way Instagram and Twitter and Facebook all curate content has worn me out to the point where I basically treat all those platforms as broadcast media 95% of the time.
Anyway, I was talking with a couple of people (one on Insta, the other on Twitter) briefly, in that other 5% of the time, and the same metaphor emerged from both conversations: that cancer treatment is like running marathons. (Or in my case half-marathons, because I never ran a full one. I'm a slow runner and I don't even want to do things I *like* for five hours in a row.)
It's also like writing novels. Or grieving. Or giving up smoking. Or anything else that's really difficult and exhausting and emotionally fraught.
Which is to say, it's the least helpful thing in the world when people say "You're almost done!" or "Halfway there!" or whatever, because you can't think about that. You can't think about anything except, okay, run to the next fire hydrant. Good job, now run to that tree. Oh man, now I have to run to the top of that hill. Okay, got up the hill, now I can run to that church.
So it's just getting through today. And then it's about getting through tomorrow.
I don't know if it's like that for everybody, but it is for me.
Well, I've got second degree burns in my armpit, one of my incisions has split open (these are normal radiation side effects), and my stamina has hit a new low (like, the last time I ran out of energy this fast, I was recovering from the flu and it had triggered my asthma to a point that felt like pneumonia) but all my friends are wonderful and it's Friday, so I have two whole days before I have to go get zapped again.
I can't wait until I can enjoy my terrible sunburn and my exhaustion without having to drive to the hospital every morning.