Welcome to the show, my name is Nathan Robertson-Ball and today's episode is slightly different from some of the others. It's with author and journalist Megan Maurice, about her new book Life Goes On that is her account - told through her own experience and that of several others - about life after a cancer diagnosis.
Something I enjoy and want to explore through Finding Nature is how other people do change, how they grow and evolve from the person they were to who they are now and where they're ideally trying to get to. Most of the time we get to choose this, the privilege of having options to consider and make decisions about. Other times though we don't get that choice and we have to deal with the world giving us a hand that isn't one we want to take, from the sudden death of a loved one, a redundancy, the ending of a relationship, even the dreaded but much less significant call from daycare that your toddler's unwell and needs to be picked up. We all have stories of grief, loss and pain in our lives, most of which are invisible and unknown to those around us.
Megan's book Life Goes On explores in beautiful detail the experience of receiving a cancer diagnosis as a 36 year old. Suddenly choices were removed and the next stages of her life were filled with and overwhelmed by the medical process that followed. Doctors, scans, treatments and therapies. What stood out to me about Megan's story though was how this diagnosis and her subsequent experiences tore through her sense of identity, her own understanding of her life and what was to come and the stories she had told herself about herself.
The relevance of this conversation to me is that all of us go through these periods in our lives. We experiences themselves at some point, sudden and tragic events happen to our family members, friends and colleagues, yet so much of what we need to, have to and will do is just move on, often suffering in solitude or isolation away from the fears - real or perceived - of those around us.
I'm very fortunate that I've not received an acute medical diagnosis, but it's likely that I will. I've suffered terrible losses and experience grief about what was been lost and cannot be retrieved. The immediate aftermath is usually surreal - how life was can no longer be, it's forever different, and that process of adjustment is often a rocky one, taking time, work, help, care and acceptance.
While this chat isn't the usual how to do sustainability episode, it very much touches on similar themes that are familiar in professional contexts - challenge, loss, the need for patience and acceptance, the necessity of asking for help. Above all though, we all deal with grief, loss and pain in our lives as people, which is who we are under our professional identities.
This chat with Megan was an honour for me, as was reading Life Goes On. I recommend getting yourself a copy as I suspect you'll also resonate and relate to parts of her experience like I did, regardless of whether you've experienced a serious health scare like she did.
I hope you take something meaningful from this conversation. It helped me better appreciate the gifts in my life and bring back front and centre for me that often the most difficult periods of my life can be viewed now as times of valuable personal metamorphosis that only great pain could bring about.
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