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Life Cancer…

I’ve been trying to come up with a good way to describe the damage that being in a bad marriage can inflict upon your life. After living in a bad marriage for 12 years, and now being in one that is my individual perfect, I have the ability to back at the physical and psychological differences I’ve experienced and quantify them.

If you looked at me now, or spent time talking to me now, and compared me to the person I was before I got divorced, the differences would be startling. The state I was in prior to my divorce both physically and emotionally was incredibly unhealthy. I was stressed, sad and angry all the time. I had road rage, I drank too much, and I was so emotionally stretched that I sometimes cried at the drop of a hat. I was overweight and routinely felt fatigued. I was the guy you didn’t want to talk to because asking me something along the lines of, how’s it going, opened up a can of worms nobody really wanted to talk about. I was uncomfortable in my career and always looking for something different or better that would make me feel more fulfilled. I couldn’t seem to find anything that could keep me happy or excited. I was unmotivated. I was miserable.

Looking at me now, you wouldn’t think I could ever be that kind of person. Today I’m 40 years old and I’m in better shape than I have ever been in my life. I’m back to being an upbeat, driven, successful person. I am so comfortable and happy in my life in general that there are times I just look around at what I have and where I am and I smile. There is a calm that comes over me now and a passion for the life I’m living that drives me to do things and accomplish things that other people wouldn’t even dream of trying. I’m exactly where I’ve always wanted to be in life. Furthermore, I’m exactly where cynics tell you people can never get.

So what is the difference between me now and who I was then? What is the difference between me and you? I removed a cancer from my life. I decided I didn’t want to have it anymore. I cured myself of the negative effects.

Webster’s dictionary defines cancer as “something evil or malignant that spreads destructively.” It is also defined as “a malignant tumor of potentially unlimited growth that expands locally by invasion.“ When you’re talking about cancer in your body, the parallels between that and an incompatible relationship are easy to point out.

When cancer first starts it isn’t noticeable or destructive at all. It works in the background quietly growing and multiplying without the slightest of symptoms to draw your attention to the threat. While it may start to adversely affect the functioning of your body, those adverse effects aren’t noticeable enough in and of themselves to really concern you.

The same types of things are happening if you’re in an incompatible relationship. The incompatibilities don’t bother you at first. You don’t notice them at all really. Over time though, they start to force you to change things about yourself and how you normally act. At first, those changes aren’t problematic. You might even be happy to make them. But there are times when you change things or compromise on things you don’t actually want to eliminate from your life. Those little undesirable compromises and changes don’t adversely affect your life enough that you notice the effects immediately, but somewhere down deep, the first life cancer cells have formed and are quietly multiplying.

The longer a cancer is allowed to go unchecked in your body, the more noticeable symptoms become. Maybe a bruise doesn’t go away. Fatigue sets in. You gain or lose weight unexplainably. You start to notice pain or other physical maladies that you can’t really seem to explain. In your mind you might start to wonder if something serious is going wrong, but you’d rather rationalize the symptoms in another way and treat them individually than consider the possibility that you have a serious medical condition to worry about. You go about your life convincing yourself nothing serious is wrong, but the thought creeps into the back of your mind that you should probably keep tabs on the situation.

Just like real cancer, the longer you stay in an incompatible relationship, the more of those similar things start to happen as a result of your life cancer. Over months and years of compromises and disagreements, the effects start to become more noticeable. You get into arguments because you want to do something that you’ve been missing out on or because you think you should move your life in a direction your spouse doesn’t agree with. You’ve had repeated arguments about specific issues so you stop bringing them up and just swallow the anger or resentment you feel because that’s better than having the same drawn out argument over and over that you’ve never been able to resolve before. You start to wonder if you’ll ever be able to stop arguing and fleeting thoughts enter your mind that your marriage isn’t as good as you wanted it to be. You try to bury those thoughts along with your anger and resentment, but you can’t let it all go without dealing with it in some way. You begin to turn to food or alcohol or cigarettes or other destructive pleasures to appease yourself and reward yourself for dealing with the negativity. You begin to take your pain and frustration out on other people through road rage or nasty looks and those people start to observe you and consider you to be an angry person in general. Your life cancer has spread and is starting to be more bothersome to your entire life. You start to wonder if you want to live this way for the rest of your life, but you try to erase that thought from your memory because the implications are too scary to really think about.

Eventually real cancer becomes so invasive that you can’t help but accept that you have a real problem. You go to the doctor and finally hear the words. The fear and magnitude of the situation finally hit you and you start to talk about options and percentages and possible solutions. You realize you’ve got a battle ahead of you if you have any chance at living a long and happy life moving forward. You finally have to accept reality and do whatever is necessary to try to survive.

That day comes with life cancer as well. There is a day when you wake up and you realize you just don’t want to live the life you’re living anymore. You don’t want to be in your marriage anymore. You’re tired of the fighting and the generally cold life you share, and you can’t continue to deal with the negativity and the incompatibility without figuring out why it’s there. This is when you turn to doctors as well.

They also talk about the percentages and their solutions. They tell you that you’ve got to fight for your relationship if you want to have a happy life moving forward. They tell you that the reality of life is that you will fight and you will have to compromise if you want to survive.

This is where real cancer and life cancer differ. Doctors can help you cure real cancer. The treatments are invasive and sometimes life threatening. They make you feel worse before you feel better, but they can truly cure you and get you back to a state of real health and happiness.

When dealing with life cancer the doctors you turn to for help don’t try to cure you entirely. They try to convince you to deal with the symptoms and forever accept with them as a part of your life. Their treatments are sometimes equally as invasive, but the upside of dealing with them isn’t a true cure and a happy life. It’s a partial improvement and marginally better hopes for a life happier than you’re currently living.

What they fail to realize as well is that they can’t just treat one specific patient when life cancer is present. It isn’t confined to one person. Life cancer is contagious once it has a foothold. It is spread through experience and through word of mouth. It is spread through observation. It changes people’s perceptions and alters their brains convincing them that it isn’t a problem at all. It is even more contagious when being treated because anyone who experiences or observes the treatments is being directly exposed to a form of life cancer that people don’t presently identify as cancer, but rather, normal life. People choose to accept life cancer and try to spread it in a self-serving attempt to make the symptoms seem less bothersome by making sure everyone deals with them. Life cancer has become what those people describe as a normal marriage.

Consider me your life cancer oncologist. I’m here to discuss the real cure and the sustainable solution that can help you have real health and happiness. I defeated life cancer myself and I want you to defeat it as well.

The treatment I would recommend is invasive but it is a real cure. It is a drawn out process, but one that you control every step of the way. It has a 100% success rate among people that truly follow it. The following steps will cure life cancer:

1. Define the exact life you want to live down to the smallest detail. When creating that definition don’t allow any outside influences to sway your desires or lead you to any compromises or concessions what-so-ever.

2. Determine whether or not your spouse can live that exact life with you and be 100% happy and fulfilled in it as well.

3. If they can’t, get divorced.

4. Find someone who wants all the same things you do, and who wants to live life the exact same way.

5. Marry that person.

6. Live that life.

Society will tell you that you can’t do what I just outlined for you. People will tell you that you have to deal with “normal” ups and downs in any relationship. Those people have life cancer. They haven’t decided to eliminate it from their lives. Their brains have changed to the point where they don’t even see the problem. They want you to experience the same negative symptoms so they can continue to define them as normal.

Having life cancer isn’t normal, it is simply common. It is a malignant and destructive force on your entire life and body. Choose to fight it.

Help me eradicate life cancer!

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