The Myth of Normal 75

is one of the torments imposed on the traumatized child. For much of her life V loathed herself, as so many victims of early abuse end up doing. “How did I get it?” she writes about the onset of her cancer. “Was it worry every day for fifty-seven years that I wasn’t good enough? . . . Was it the pressure to fill Madison Square Garden with eighteen thousand or the Superdome with forty thousand? . . . Was it the line of two hundred women repeated in hundreds of small towns for many years after each performance, after each speech, women lined up to show me their scars, wounds, warrior tattoos? Was it suburban lawn pesticides? . . . Was it my first husband sleeping with my close friend? . . . Was it sleeping with men who were married? . . . Was it not enough boundaries? Was it too many walls?” When I asked her what she thinks now, V prefaced her answer with a laugh, perhaps sardonic. “I think it’s a combination of all of the above,” she said. “But I think that if there were one underlying reason why I got sick, it was unreckoned—I hadn’t gone deep enough in processing my trauma.” She then made a profound observation about the nature of illness itself: “A disease is not like a thing. It is energy flow, it’s a current; it is evolution or devolution that occurs when you’re not awake and connected, and trauma is essentially ruling your life. I think it’s such a mistake to identify it as a thing, because that makes it hard matter when it’s in fact a much more psychological, spiritual, emotional condition.” This hard-won perspective raises some unfamiliar, potentially fruitful questions. What if, she writes, “when you got sick, you weren’t a stage [of a disease] but in a process? And cancer, just like having your heart broken, or getting a new job, or going to school, were a teacher? What if, rather than being cast out and defined by some terminal category, you were identified as someone in the middle of a transformation that could deepen your soul, open your heart?” V’s survival of a near-terminal diagnosis owed much to the heroic efforts and skills of modern medicine, including multiple complex surgeries and chemotherapy. But that’s not all that saved her, as she sees it. V herself generated a powerful complement to these interventions in the way she approached healing: a willingness to experience disease not as a “thing,” an