Conquering Disrupters
What if I Feel Like I Can’t Handle This?
We are living in a time of upheaval and unpredictability. Life-transitions and disruptions are increasing. In his book Life is in the Transitions: Mastering Change at Any Age, Bruce Feiler argues that the average adult experiences three dozen transitions in a lifetime, 3-5 of which are “massive reorientations” or what he calls “Lifequakes,” which he defines as “a forceful burst of change in one’s life that leads to a period of upheaval, transition, and renewal” (79). The old view of predictable adult stages is giving way to a non-linear view. Gail Sheehy’s ground-breaking 1974 book Passages, its cover spelling out Passages like ascending stairs with each letter signifying a step of progress to the top, matched the idea of orderly progression within adult development. This approach no longer conforms to actual experiences or the times we are living in now, times of technological, religious, social, and political upheaval. A new perspective is needed, a realistic, flexible, and gritty perspective that leans into the inevitability of disrupters.
How do you conquer disrupters? The first step is counterintuitive: get used to them. When a disrupter hits, the natural response is to condemn it by refusing to deal with it. It’s common to enter a survival state with mental resources dispatched to cope instead of feel. Funeral arrangements require attention, a medical team needs to be assembled, decisions need to be made, acute pain must be endured. We’re focused on survival.
One form of condemning a disrupter is to be submerged and paralyzed by fear. Fear magnetizes worst-case scenarios that zap a person’s resilience. Fear becomes fact and overtakes rational abilities. A woman feels a lump and concludes she’s dying, a man loses his job and sees himself living on the street, or a parent has a child with a drug problem and thinks there’s no future for the child. What we need is to make fear a lesser factor—even a non-factor—in our decisions by reining it in and creating breathing room for facts.
Another form is to deny and compartmentalize. By putting aside their worries until further notice, deniers train themselves to be calm through the initial experience of loss. Unfortunately, they can also become stoic. They experience the feeling of watching themselves from afar, a surreal state. Deniers mistake detachment for strength. In so doing, they try to keep their feelings under strict control, like pushing a beach ball under water, but eventually the feelings find other ways of escape. Both submersion and detachment are self-protective ways to deflect the destruction of the disrupter, and both hinder the process of growth. Both ways flow from the same question, “What if I can’t handle this?”
As I shared in previous posts, my default position is denial. It feels like grit, and grit is survival.* Without denial, I fear falling into helplessness and despair. A memory flashes through my mind of defiantly depressing the door handle of the Tarzana Hospital where I am about to have my first biopsy in 2002, feeling certain that this is a waste of the doctor’s and my time. I almost cancel the biopsy the night before, but Rick persuades me to go. I go alone, telling Rick to pick me up when I’m done, like I’m going to In N Out. I’m only half conscious of my dismissive moves to push away the possibility of bad news. I wake up to the words I never considered hearing, “You have breast cancer.” A couple of weeks later—after a sentinel node biopsy—I find out it has spread and I need chemo, a dreaded fear, like touching a tarantula. While helpful in coping, denial has a downside of fending off a harsh reality.
I move toward my first chemo with growing confidence, my thoughts and attitude geared up to fight. Friends, family, and faith make up a tripod of support. A network of survivor sisters emerges from the shadows like ghosts taking on flesh. My mom takes a six-month leave of absence from her ministry in Germany to help our family. Worship and singing pump me up. The support feels like being carried on a litter. I am moving toward the tarantula, or so I think.
I don’t realize it, but I’m in denial. Feeling strong, anxiety under control, I am ready to go. I don’t have a port for my first chemo—a 1 mm titanium tube inserted in the arm or chest to transport the chemo cocktail of three poisonous drugs for a good cause to the heart. The nurse takes my hand and begins injecting the dreaded the “Red-Devil”—Adriamycin—into my veins. She warns me not to move my hand because one drop can burn the skin. What? It can’t touch the skin, but it goes right to the heart! Her warning is hardly floating in the noise space when yellow splotches blur my vision and I faint. I hear the nurse shout “Dr. Dosik!” through the clinic as her frenetic movements kick in. They suspect a heart attack, but it turns out to be anxiety. I regain consciousness but not the nurse’s respect, and she brands me as nervous for the rest of my time there.
Slowly but surely, my first breast cancer diagnosis deposes me from the throne of invincibility and upends my life. As reality sets in, denial dissolves and I move toward acceptance. The fear, however, settles into a cool cave of my memory removed from the power of erosion. As I approach my first chemo treatment for a recurrence 17 years later in 2019, the fear emerges from the cave, preserved and fresh, to greet me at the clinic door. Fear has a way of staying trapped in the past with memories the body remembers. This time, however, I’m wiser and more aware of my propensity to deny. So, I take an anxiety pill and pray! An hour into the dreaded treatment, I experience the happy reality of medical advances since my 2002 chemo. I’m in a more humane world of new anti-nausea agents and patient care that seems almost too good to be true. My fear starts to dissipate.**
Submersion and compartmentalizing are stress reactions to Lifequakes. If a reaction becomes a habit or lifestyle, it’s time to reflect and ask ourselves questions. Why do I get paralyzed by fear? Why do I compartmentalize? What am I afraid of, unwilling to face? What steps can I take to yield to the pain, to accept my situation? It’s best to move to accepting and owning our losses in order to harness the creative potential of disrupters and to do it as often as necessary. That’s when pain transforms us and connects us to others in pain.
What is you default mode? What do you fear? Are you willing to take steps today to stop condemning your disrupter and begin to endure it? This is a first step in the journey toward accepting—even embracing, if possible—our disrupters.
*https://lifeafterwhy.com/blog/how-i-finally-stopped-compartmentalizing-my-feelings
**https://lifeafterwhy.com/home/on-conquering-chemo-fears
Source cited:
Feiler, Bruce. Life is in the Transitions: Mastering Change at Any Age. Penguin Press, 2020.
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