There can be a beautiful innocence in living through our teenage years, a kind of what you don’t know about life yet glow. I remember this phase of growing up myself. It was lovely, a time of now worries and lots of time to be a full on teenager. Not yet in the adult systems of life there was a type of simple freedom in my teenage hood. Though this is not true for all of us it is for many. Teenage bliss I would call it – an important time as we develop a solid sense of self and life.
So, when we are met with the prognosis of cancer in that instant whether we acknowledge it or not we face our death. This is a profound event not to be brushed aside. In this moment our teenage bliss is immediately ended. We are catapulted into an early adulthood none of us expected. The shock is so abrupt we often miss it.
Our youthful innocence is bumped out of the way by the necessity to face what we typically don’t expect to face until much later in our lives – our death. Even if we are successful and cancer is beaten into submission it does not alter the fact that we indeed faced death head on. Even if we fully recover, the damage to our youthful innocence has been done. It is not that we cannot go back to our teenaged ways it is that our perspective has changed,
What to do?
Well here are three things I would suggest;
- Create a ritual to let go of or bury your teenage innocence.
- Talk about what it was like for you to face head on the diagnosis of cancer and a possibility of death.
- Create a daily practice of gratitude.
Below are some basic ideas for each ‘project’. Have a read through the ideas and feel free to be creative and put your own unique signature on each of them. I wrote these ideas out to simply give you a framework of the possibilities you could choose from or work within.
- Create a ritual to let go of or bury your teenage innocence.
I have found ritual very helpful when it comes to letting go of things that have changed. We use ritual for death of the body, we can also use it for ‘death’ of things we once had that we no longer do. In this case facing cancer, death, is the loss of our innocence. We had to grow up in a hurry to deal with cancer and all it brought our way. We were in a system filled with adults and some serious concerns. By creating a ritual we acknowledge we grew up kinda’ fast.
The ritual could be writing out how we felt on paper, burning it and spreading the ashes in our garden. It could be burying a favorite object, or toy. The important thing is that the ritual you create reflects for you what you lost by facing cancer at a young age.
- Talk about what it was like for you to face head on the diagnosis of cancer and a possibility of death.
I would also be important to talk to someone who was not a medical staff member, and perhaps not a family member. It is important that it would be a person you trust that would be there just for you. Getting the truth out and spoken to one other person who will understand what you have to say and not judge you or criticize you help lighten the mental burden we sometimes carry after facing a challenge such as cancer.
- Create a daily practice of gratitude.
I have found for myself that being grateful for what I have and whom I know is really important for my happiness. Often, after a close call like cancer we have a renewed sense of how lucky we are to be alive. By doing a daily gratitude practice of listing five to ten things we are grateful for in our lives that day we will discover a deeper sense of joy.
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