Rethinking Our Language Around Illness

When I was a kid, I would hear all the time about how bad cancer was and how many people suffer with it. I also heard about the stories of people who have survived it or “beaten” it, as we as a society like to say.

I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder at the age of 7, which I still have today and probably always will. Illness was something I heard all too much about at that age, and throughout my life.

Anyone with a chronic illness will have heard the advice of “look on the bright side” or some variation of that a million times. And if you have, you probably cringed, or got angry at reading that, once again.

I remember reading about how the positivity that cancer survivors had was something to be admired, and something that helped them “beat” cancer. Their strength helped them beat it. While this is part of that equation, this strength and positivity always felt like it was romanticized. There are also plenty of positive people who die from cancer.

Even at this young age, I had asked the question. If people who beat cancer are strong, and their positivity is somehow linked to that…are those who died of cancer, weak? Were they not positive enough? Would them being more positive, more strong, been the one factor that saved their lives?

That’s what we subtly imply with that kind of language. These are thoughts that kids absolutely have as they try to understand the world and the frameworks we push. 

I’m not denying the fact that people’s health is generally better if they are happier and vice versa. The body affects the mind and the mind affects the body. But your attitude is not the sole reason why you fight off an illness, or why you caught one.

I can’t fully understand the love we have for “strength” and “positivity” in cancer survivors. Maybe because that’s the easier truth to hear? You don’t like hearing about the repeated  vomiting, diarrhea, chronic pain, etc…and that’s not even including the mental and emotional struggles. It’s easy to chalk up someone’s recovery to their mindset. You don’t have to think as much, you don’t have to ask questions, you don’t have to face the horrors of it all and you can go on and live your life. 

But that’s not the reason why they did or did not recover. And what’s even more detrimental, is when we actively suppress the dark sides of illnesses in our public discourse about it, it discourages those from validating their own negative experiences, which has its own set of problems. This is a side effect of us romanticizing positivity so much.

Imagine you are suffering from an illness, the past few weeks of your life have been hell, yet all you encounter online regarding the illness is how strong victims of the illness are. Your reality does not feel like that.

You are not being listened to. After hearing “look on the brightside” your whole life, you begin to devalue anything in your mind that isn’t “on the brightside”. Suppression of negative emotion (or any emotion) is not healthy for a person. This isn’t a call to dwell in negativity, but these emotions have to be acknowledged and processed. Everyone experiences negativity, there’s no reason to act like it doesn’t exist. There is no reason to romanticize positivity.

Think about the children of today, how many of them are internalizing those subtle messages about strength and positivity? Maybe it’s not a whole lot, maybe I’m wrong. However, we as a society do need to make more space for negative emotions, even without the context of illness. We need to hear more about the struggles of those dealing with mental or physical illnesses or in horrible situations. When I was diagnosed with my disorder, I could have easily thought that the reason I’ve been struggling with it is my mindset. Now I have this pressure to fabricate positivity. My “cure” is now achieving a level of positivity that no one realistically lives in.

Next time someone opens up to you, tells you about something that’s going wrong in their life, pause and question your urge to ask them to look on the bright side. Does this person need an ear, a friend to lean on, someone to acknowledge their struggle, or advice? If you’re not sure, you can ask them.

There’s nothing wrong with positivity in itself. The problem is when it gets out of hand, and we start to devalue anything that doesn’t fit society’s narrative of “This person is so strong and positive”.