The Same Boat

A person whom I had only met relatively recently, but with whom I had had a reasonable amount of in-depth conversations about all sorts of things, stunned me by telling me, eight months after we'd first met, that she had had breast cancer in the past. 

I wasn't stunned by the diagnosis, god knows at this stage it seems cancer in doctors is at epidemic proportions.

I was just amazed that in all the chats we had had about health and the future and the past, she had chosen to not disclose this. And when she told me, she was still quite uncomfortable, and we quickly moved on to another topic. 

Why was I so taken aback? I felt like she had done me a disservice by not buddying up with me and "sharing" in that saccharine way we have all come to expect from years of immersion in pseudo-psychology. I felt hurt that she had chosen to keep her personal private business to herself, and had decided to not harp on and on about it to anyone who would listen. 

Why should she tell me, just because I have cancer too? I don't go up to every 1999 Fiesta owner I see and start chatting about how great they are to park in tight spaces. I don't suddenly become best mates with anyone who ever went to Barcelona on holidays. So why should I be suddenly bonding with a relative stranger just because she was once an oncologist's patient too?

I know quite a few people with cancer who have no interest whatsoever in broadcasting this fact to the world at large. I have interacted with strangers online who have told me about their diagnosis, but in direct messages rather than on a public forum.  

I read this about David Bowie's death. It struck a chord. 

"he’s just bucked one of the most powerful and nauseating trends of our era: the victim-therapeutic complex which demands that we keep nothing private, that we advertise our failures and fragile mortality to a watching, sadness-hungry world."

It kind of shut me up.

Briefly.