Lorna is only thirty-three but she has already walked a long road with cancer.
Operations, chemo, radiation, medication… the doctors can’t quite seem to clear her body of it – but it also doesn’t seem to be worsening.
Due to various complications, she is now in a wheelchair, and is watching all her friends create lives for themselves—lives like the one she dreamed of for herself.
However her life is a never-ending stream of check-ups, scans, physiotherapy, large quantities of medications and regular emergency visits to the hospital.
“Look, I want to love myself, I really do,” she says to me one day in our therapy session, “but I feel so angry about being stuck in this while others get to live and play. My body is such a disappointment. I really got a dud.”
As she explores the Love question she finds she can appreciate and love herself for who she is and how she handles everything, but she just can’t manage to love this body that’s let her down so badly. “It’s betrayed me”, she says angrily. “It doesn’t deserve my love or forgiveness!”
Lorna’s body experience is extremely difficult but she’s tired of being at war with it.
Now she wants to find love and peace with all parts of herself, even her wretched body.
She needs to figure out what to do differently in this situation to achieve that.
“I wish I could feel less angry. I wish I could feel less scared. I wish I was OK with this somehow – but how do you make peace with this? How do I accept that my body is probably going to slowly give in to the cancer and abandon me?”
One day as we are deep within one of these painful conversations, she asks herself the Love question and finds herself answering, “If I loved myself, I would be my own best friend. I would encourage myself and believe in myself and never leave my side and always be the one with something good to say to me.”
She’s quiet for a moment and then says, “It would be easier to deal with all this if I had someone like that with me. Someone I didn’t feel I was burdening, or fear that they’d had enough of my boring story.”
She considers what being her own best friend would involve, and realizes that she’s felt judged and abandoned by herself at times:
“This is the body I have. I can’t help it. But it’s like I have judged it as deficient and turned away from me. Like I’m embarrassed to be me, to have this body and this disease, and I don’t want anything to do with me.
But it’s me! I can’t avoid being with me. So I judge myself and feel repulsed by me but at the same time I feel hurt and abandoned by me? That’s crazy.”
She is intrigued by this new idea of becoming her own best friend and begins a period of reconciliation between the parts of herself.
She has many internal conversations and mediations between the warring thoughts and beliefs within her.
Slowly a truce begins to form, and she starts to take charge of her experience in a different way.
She begins to deliberately speak encouragingly to herself.
She actively seeks out things that will help her accept herself more and strengthen her inner journey, like inspiring people she knows and authors and speakers that resonate with her.
“It’s strange,” she says. “Nothing outside has changed. My body is the same, I still do the treatments and everything, but it feels very different to me. It’s become easier to accept somehow, and I fight it less, and that makes it feel as though there is less bad stuff happening to me. I have more good moments now.”
While it remains a daily journey, Lorna has reached her goal of finding some kind of peace within this experience.
Because she has her best friend doing it with her.
If you loved yourself, how would you be your own best friend now?
