The Myth of Normal 76

external enemy, but as a process that encompasses all of her life—present, past, and future—and, ultimately, even as a teacher. Beyond the War Metaphor We are used to seeing disease as a thing to get rid of or a foe to battle against —as, for example, in the “war on cancer.” (Which “war,” for the record, has been far from victorious.)[1] Someday, we tell ourselves, with enough research, we as a society will “beat” cancer and wipe it out; in the meantime, we maintain a tenaciously defiant attitude, as expressed in the viral hashtag #FuckCancer. Our everyday language gives voice to our combative stance: we hear of a friend or a family member courageously “battling MS” or some other illness; they will either prevail in the struggle or else “succumb.” It may be that these martial metaphors are so appealing because their force matches our feelings of anger and despair; that does not, however, make them helpful. In a previous work I quoted the Canadian oncologist Karen Gelman, a leading breast cancer specialist, who looks askance at the military depiction of cancer care and research. “What happens in the body is a matter of flow— there is input and there is output,” she said, “and you can’t control every aspect of it. We need to understand that flow, know there are things you can influence and things you can’t. It’s not a battle, it’s a push-pull phenomenon of finding balance and harmony, of kneading the conflicting forces into one dough.”[2] I noticed how closely her use of “flow” mirrors V’s language— one woman speaking from medical expertise, the other from hard-earned, subjectively sourced insight. Beyond the declarations of war, there is another, even more popular class of misapprehensions that cloud our view of disease: “I have cancer.” “She has MS.” “My nephew has ADD.” Embedded in each phrase is the unexamined assumption that there is an I (or a someone) distinct and independent from the thing called disease, which the “I” has—as in the statement “I have a flat-screen TV.” Here is my life, and over there is the disease that has encroached upon it. Seen this way, disease is something external with its own nature, existing independently of the person in whom it