Life After Lemonade: Journaling Workbook
by April Capil
Copyright 2012 April Capil
Smashwords Edition
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Introduction
In Recipe For Lemonade, I shared my strategies for crisis management: how to make it through a tough time without falling apart. I gave readers three real strategies that helped me survive my toughest life challenges: being honest with yourself about your expectations, putting things in perspective, and counting your blessings. Despite "out of the woods," though, I still didn’t feel like I'd made it back home. It was as if I was living in a limbo-like “half-life,” caught between a world that was in ruins, and a “new normal” I was supposed to be living in, but didn’t have a map to get to. I found myself wondering, was it even possible to feel “normal” again, and was I crazy for thinking I could?
And then, a funny thing happened.
After I finished Recipe For Lemonade, I started reading a lot of Joseph Campbell. Considered one of the world’s leading experts on mythology, Campbell wrote primarily about the “Hero’s Journey” – a kind of mythic structure he proposed all stories follow, whether you are talking about the Bible or Star Wars. The Hero’s Journey, Campbell argued, is a kind of storyline that leads a person down a path that is universal to human existence, because it is a path of growth and development. This path – this journey – of life, and death, and rebirth, is one that all human beings go through and experience, and because of this, we subconsciously recognize its patterns and milestones.
After reflecting on Campbell’s work, I thought about my own “Hero’s Journey” - how it began, where it took me, and most importantly, how far I’d come, in the aftermath of so much disaster. What I realized, looking back, was that I wasn’t at the end of my journey. I was only in the middle. I had vanquished Sauron, but I was still in Mordor - miles and miles from the Shire, with no map telling me how to get back. No wonder I didn’t feel like I’d reached my “new normal” – I wasn’t there yet. I wasn’t even close.
There are a lot of resources out there on how to deal with a diagnosis of cancer, how to treat cancer you already have, and how to get through treatment in one piece. What I had trouble finding, while I was going through my own battle, was advice on what to do after treatment. How was I supposed to go back to being the person I was BEFORE cancer - someone I felt like I could never be again, having had it? Even when I started to look like me, I didn’t feel like me. And as person after person came to me with stories about how my book had gotten them through losing a child, going through a divorce, or recovering from trauma, I realized that they were all in the same limbo I was: out of the woods, but not home yet.
Substitute “cancer” for any number of life-changing crises and you find that all survivors have the same two questions: The first is, how do I get through this? The second is, how do I get back to where I was before this? This journaling workbook will walk you through exercises that will help you answer to the second question: life, after lemonade. How to get from out of the woods to home safe.
PART ONE: THE HARD TRUTHS
Chapter One: The Future You Thought You Had
We are told, over and over, what we deserve, because of the decisions we’ve made. We are told that if we get the right education, if we make the right investment, if we marry the right person, that we are entitled to have whatever we want. It doesn’t matter who’s doing the telling, of course. Sometimes it’s the TV, or your parents, or a poster on a Metro train. Sometimes, it’s something you tell yourself, based on some story you’ve made up in your head or a dogma you believe in. After a while, we might start to believe that happiness is a combination to a safe – right 23, left 37, right 16. If we can just figure out the combination, if we can just do everything right, we tell ourselves, we’ll never have to worry about anything, ever again. It seems perfectly logical – exactly like a Newtonian universe should be.
It’s a rude awakening, when life doesn’t serve up what you wanted. When you dance for rain and the clouds don’t roll in. You might start to think you didn’t dance hard enough, or long enough, or often enough. You might even start to think you DID something to deserve your misfortune, that it’s God’s punishment for your sins or your inadequacies. You might go the other way, and feel cheated and unjustly victimized by a vengeful deity. You might hate your Creator for unjustly screwing you over. No matter what your reaction is, it’s all the same thing: you, telling yourself a story, to explain what happened.
Now, if you’ve read Recipe For Lemonade, you know the first step in making lemonade from lemons is doing what I just did: being honest with yourself about what your expectations were in a situation. There are more steps, of course, but the first one – examining what you thought you deserved – is often the most important, because it opens your eyes. It makes you see the kind of thinking that got you into this mess, and once you can look at your logic honestly, and most importantly, without judgment, you can put yourself on a path out of the woods.
If you’ve made it through a crisis, you’ve already made it out of the woods. But if you truly want to get back home, the first thing you must do is curb any stirrings of entitlement. Stop whining about how much you’ve been through or what you think you deserve because of what you’ve been through. Let go of what you think life owes you.
Writing Exercise: What story are you telling yourself about what you "deserve," because of what you've been through? What does your "formula" for happiness look like? Where did this idea come from, and why do you believe it? Are you getting sucked into "time machine" logic: believing that if you could be the person you were before disaster, you could have the future you thought you were going to have? What did you lose, and what would your happiness look like, if you had to live without it? What are you going to have to let go of, to move on? Are you trapping yourself in a world that you want to be different?
Chapter Two: No One Here Gets Out Alive
The second phase of survivorship is what I call "Accepting the Inevitability of Death.” Let's face it: no one here gets out alive. It's news to most people, that they're mortal. That you don't have any insurance against tragedy, against disappointment, or unmet expectations, or plane crashes. Pile up all the statistics you want - you can still be that one in a million person in the wrong place at the wrong time, and there's nothing you can do about it, because guess what? That's life. It begins, it ends, and nothing in between is guaranteed.
Reckoning with life's unpredictability and uncontrollability is the second stage of survivorship because once you've acknowledged and accepted the loss of something you didn't think you could lose, you have to face the fact that you can lose other things, including the time you – and yes, your loved ones – have left on this planet. When my mother died, and my father died twelve years later, I was dumbfounded, and angry, and baffled. You see, growing up, I held the belief that although children are orphaned all the time on the news and in stories, surely I would never be one of those kids. There’s actually a name for this kind of thinking – it’s called the Lake Woebegone Effect – when a person believes that bad things do happen, but they happen to other people. This naïveté, of course, is not exclusive to children. Our own country, in the wake of 9/11, was shell-shocked – positively horrified that a terrorist attack could happen here, even though it had happened years before, in the exact same building! Why were people surprised? Because 9/11 reminded us that bad things happen, and they can happen here, and now, without warning, to people who don’t deserve it.
Surviving something life-threatening means acknowledging the heaviest of realizations: that you could have died. What's important to remember, as you reckon with this stage of survivorship is, you're not made of steel, but you're not made of glass either. It's easy to walk around like the other shoe is going to drop, preparing for a future where cancer might come back, where another baby might be miscarried, where someone else might break your heart, but why waste what little life you have left on this earth preparing for disaster to strike again? Disaster may strike; it may not. Chances are, you probably won't see it coming, even if it does. I spent a lot of time post-treatment asking myself, "What happens if my cancer comes back?" until a nurse asked me, "What if it doesn't?" I realized that I really was living like I was dying - but that I should be living like I was living. There's a difference between knowing your life is going to end someday, and living like that end is imminent. So strive for a balance: acknowledge your mortality, but remember: you're still alive.