Deja Vu: What To Do When A Lemon Returns

"You fell off the wagon AGAIN?"

"You're getting divorced AGAIN?"

"You have cancer AGAIN?"

AGAIN. It's the hardest word in the English language to hear. It fills us with shame and disappointment and fear and exhaustion. ANOTHER lemon. ANOTHER unmet expectation. AGAIN.

The day after I celebrated my second year of being cancer-free, I felt a lump in my healthy breast. Oh no, I thought. Not again...

My mind was filled with the ramifications and justifications associated with a recurrence: I'd have to get a double mastectomy. I'd never be able to breast feed. If it was in my lymph nodes, I'd have to go through chemo again and lose my hair - my hair, which I had just started to enjoy having again! And if they gave me Adriamycin, it would damage my heart, compromising my ability to even carry a child full-term. My mind raced until I had convinced myself that I had cancer AGAIN, even before I'd gotten the lump checked out by my oncologist. It wasn't surprising, I said to friends - triple negative cancers tend to recur in the third year post-treatment. I even send a long e-mail to my doctor, asking him for a plastic surgeon referral.

At the first sign of a familiar lemon, we fly into defensiveness. We gird our loins, man our battle stations, and prepare for the fight we know is coming. We might even be proud of ourselves, for being ready to face it! What we overlook is the sense of power our preparedness gives us. That's right - power. It feeds your ego when you tell yourself you know what's coming, and you might start to see the same lemon over and over - you might even resist making lemonade because if you can keep hanging onto the lemon, you never have to be surprised. You can keep living in a world where everything is predictable and controllable. When the same lemon keeps coming up in your life, ask yourself what would happen if you made lemonade - if you were honest with yourself about your expectations, about the evidence you were (or were not) paying attention to, and about how serious you are about living in a world where everything is predictable and controllable.

I have met women who joke that they keep dating the same guy over and over, which is funny unless he's a guy who beats the shit out of you. Men who keep quitting the same job, over and over. Why? Why do we do this? Because we know the routine. Because it's familiar. It's not uncharted, unknown territory. We would rather be stuck in a rut than get lost or hurt trying something new! Because why would you want to get involved in a relationship without a map, without the familiar stages and signs? BECAUSE IT MIGHT SET YOU FREE, THAT'S WHY.

The price of your freedom is courage - courage to step into a place where things are not predictable or controllable, where you don't know the routine, where there aren't any signposts or roadmaps and you have to blaze a new trail. And you know what? It's exciting, blazing a new trail. It's scary - it's scary as hell, trust me. But it's the only way out of a rut - leaving what you know behind.

Sometimes, our motivation is even darker than we think. We lose and gain the same twenty pounds again and again, and complain about it, but after a few years, those twenty pounds become a very helpful scapegoat - a reason why we didn't get the promotion, can't go out with the girls, have to buy new clothes. What would happen if we actually lost the weight? If we actually were the weight we thought would be the magic combination to a safe where all the happiness we could ever want was locked up? What if we lost the weight and we still hated our jobs, still couldn't talk to girls, still resented our mothers? What then?

When I went to my doctor, he sonogrammed my breast and told me I was fine. "But you have to understand," I told him, "That's what they said two years ago and eight months later I had Stage Three breast cancer!" He took me to his office and showed me my MRI, which, he said, can detect cellular activity a year before a tumor actually develops. I was talking to a man who worked with the woman who wrote the book on breast cancer, I realized. What did I think? That I had some magic cancer that an MRI couldn't detect, that a doctor with all his credentials would miss? I had to face the fact that I was in remission. That the other shoe wasn't dropping, and that, while it might drop in the future, it wasn't dropping anytime soon, and I had better get on with my life.

What if you're not gonna have another heart attack? What if you never date another hot mess of a woman? What if you never take a drink again, and you actually - not HAVE to, but - GET to be the person you always wanted to be? Would that be so terrible? So scary? What if the last time it all fell apart really WAS the last time? Could you build a life worth living, the life of your dreams? Will you let yourself? Because that's all you have to do: you just have to let yourself believe that you can do it, that you're worth it, and that it's time. Stop waiting for the other shoe to drop. Stop living this half-life where you're waiting for life to be the way you want it to be. MAKE it so, as Captain Kirk says. Make it so.

Now, there might be a little voice in your head that says, why do that, when it can all fall apart again? Why raise the stakes of my life, and take the risk that I will have that much more to lose? Why live big and fly high, when that means that if I fall, I'll fall hard?

Because no one really truly wants to live a life of fear and mediocrity. THAT'S why most men lead lives of quiet desperation - they're not desperate to keep something from ruining their amazing lives, but desperate to HAVE lives at all, to have more than the mundane routine of a life unfilfilled, untapped, unchallenged! Desperate because they're afraid one day they WILL go into the doctor and he's going to say STAGE THREE and you know what that desperate man is going to think about? The time he saw Bull Durham with his wife and thought about painting her toenails but was too chicken to ask if he could. The promotion he felt obligated to take right after they got married, because even though it meant a shorter honeymoon, it got us a bigger house, and isn't that more important? The summer after he graduated college, when he thought about Jack Kerouac-ing it through the Southwest, but got an internship instead. The fishing trip he took with his Dad that was too short, too short. Al the things he couldn't even DO "AGAIN" because he never did them the first time. Regret. Regret is why you should live your life now, and live it fully, without hampering it with thoughts of what if it happens again?

Paul Bowles said:

"Because we do not know when we will die,

we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well,

and yet everything happens only a certain number of times .

How many more times will you remember

a certain afternoon of your childhood

that is so deeply a part of your being

you can't even conceive of your life without it?

Perhaps four or five times more?

Perhaps not even that.

How many more times will you watch the full moon rise?

Perhaps, twenty. And yet it all seems limitless."

Live NOW. Live NOW because it's all you have and when you are broke, the things you mourn are not the things you mourn when you are dying. Trust me, I KNOW. When I thought I had cancer again, I felt nothing but relief that I had taken a road trip, and spent too much money, and seen people I always meant to see. And while I felt sheepish and unsure when my doctor told me I was *still* cancer-free, in three days I felt relief, because I am back to living like I'm living.

In closing, remember, if you do find yourself in familiar waters, there is an antidote to AGAIN: BEFORE.

BEFORE is how you handled it when you didn't know what to expect. When you hadn't been there, and you were filled with fear about what everything meant, what you were going to lose and how you were going to handle it. AGAIN means you've been there BEFORE, and this gives you an advantage in the resilience arena. BEFORE makes AGAIN easier.

So climb. Climb high and climb far, and if the other shoe drops and you lose your grip, take the fricking fall. You've done it before. You can do it again.