“You’ve got a journey ahead of you.” I remember Dr. Merker saying those words after telling me I probably had cancer. And at the time, I remember telling myself that this journey he was talking about was just going to be a detour. It would suck, but I would get through it and be back on track in no time.
Some of that was true. I did get through it. And yes, it did suck. But there was something I only began to appreciate once I was on the other side of my bone marrow transplant: this was no detour.
A detour implies that you’re making a temporary deviation from the road you’re on. And that you’ll eventually meet back up with that same road and carry on to your original destination. But this journey I found myself on wasn’t that. Instead of returning to a pre-cancer “normal,” my life branched off in a new trajectory entirely.
Because the experience changed me. For starters, I literally went from negative to positive. After my transplant, my body adopted my donor’s blood type, shifting from A-negative to O-positive (weird, I know).
But more importantly, it transformed my outlook on life and what I wanted to do with it. It inspired me to pursue a career in writing and helped me embrace life’s everyday awesomeness.
So while I wish I never had to go through cancer in the first place, I’m grateful for the positive changes it sparked in me.
It’s natural to think of crises as detours and wish for things to go back to normal. But just because “normal” feels familiar and comfortable doesn’t mean it’s where we should aim. Like a heart attack survivor returning to his daily diet of greasy hamburgers, getting back to “normal” or the “good old days” isn’t always the right direction.
Although it’s always preferable to prevent a crisis in the first place, those times can be an opportunity to consider how you might build a better normal.
The same is true for broader societal problems. When wildfires flare up, we want to snuff them out so we can breathe easier again. But those plumes of smoke and ash should also move us down a new path that tackles the climate crisis fuelling the flames in the first place.
Meanwhile, instead of just wishing for an end to the latest round of race-related protests so things can get back to normal, we should be fighting to end the systemic racism causing them.
In short, rather than seeing a crisis as a detour, look at it like a fork in the road — as an opportunity to let go of the things that don’t work and embark on a better way forward. Like my blood type, it’s about leaving the negative behind and creating something positive in its place.
