Never Give Up

Never Give Up

By now, I had begun to build something.

I had accepted where I was.

I had imagined Somewhere.

I had built teams around me.

I had learned more about my own house, asked questions and critically participated in the decisions that affected it.

I had tools.

But none of those tools could tell me what would happen tomorrow.

Cancer does not suddenly become predictable because you have a plan. There are scans. Treatments end. New information arrives. Your body changes. Good days can be followed by difficult ones.

Uncertainty never really leaves.

What changes is how you live with it.

There is a temptation to keep looking backward.

At the statistics. At what happened to other people. At what you used to be able to do. At the life you had before cancer.

The past matters. It contains information, experience and lessons.

But I learned something important:

Don’t mistake the rearview mirror for the windshield.

You use the rearview mirror. You learn from what is behind you.

But you drive looking forward.

For me, that meant continuing to face Somewhere.

But the rearview mirror wasn’t the only distraction.

There were the what ifs.

What if the treatment doesn’t work? What if the next scan is bad? What if something changes? What if?

I had to ask myself another question.

Before cancer, when everything was going well, did I live every day imagining everything that might go wrong?

No.

Had I done that, I probably wouldn’t have gone very far.

So why invite that way of thinking into my life now?

I could deal with new information when it arrived. I could question it, learn from it and change course when necessary.

But I did not need to live tomorrow’s problems today.

And I wasn’t going to reach Somewhere by moving toward it backwards.

The road would change.

My tactics could change. Even my strategy could change as the environment shifted.

Glioblastoma had already taught me that I was dealing with something that could change and challenge the plans made for it. I needed to remain flexible too.

Using the same tactics and expecting a different outcome made no sense to me.

New information meant new questions. Sometimes it meant changing the plan. Sometimes changing the people around me. Sometimes changing what I was doing myself.

Nothing had to be cast in concrete.

The direction could remain Somewhere while the route changed again and again.

That became part of what Never Give Up meant to me.

Not stubbornness.

Not repeating yesterday because it was familiar.

Learn. Question. Adapt. Keep moving.

There were days when moving forward meant doing more.

There were days when it meant simply getting through the day.

Both counted.

My teams could advise me. The people around me could support me. My experience could give me tools.

But nobody else could make the decision to keep facing forward for me.

That part was mine.

And it still is.

More than twenty years later, I still don’t know what tomorrow will bring.

None of us do.

But I know which direction I am facing.

Somewhere is still ahead of me.

The commitment was never to a particular route.

It was to keep moving forward.

So I keep looking through the windshield.

I keep moving.

Never give up.

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