When Surviving Cancer Ends and Opioid Dependence Begins
Overprescribed and alone, I found myself wondering if beating cancer was worth it
Journal entry, February 11: I can’t move forward until I tell my secret. I know I can’t tell it for myself alone, but for all those who walk the dark path of things unspoken. I must tell my truth for the sake of the silenced and ignored.
The face of
“I feel like I’m Sisyphus getting punched in the junk.”
My therapist smiled at this grand analogy. It was the only way I could articulate the experience of necessity as never-ending-ness, of misery as repetition, of life as punishment. Not just Sisyphus, not simply pushing the boulder up the hill to no avail, but also the great arm of Lyssa swinging down from the mountain top, punching me squarely between the legs with each step. Symbols are handy that way, and stories. They gift us a means to express our experiences in Technicolor, vivid with similes and metaphors. A way to make sense of the senseless, to give it shape and a handle we can grasp.
Like when we say “the face of.”
“The face of” serves as a means of understanding the big picture through a single figure, often a way to organize chaos. If we can find one face to signify the…
