Finding New Definitions of Normal
Before I got sick, I moved through each day without thinking much about it. I’d wake up, make coffee, go to the hospital for six hours of surgery, eat a quick lunch over a sink, answer emails, and head home. It all felt normal.
Because life fills in that word so easily, the way air fills a room, we rarely stop to define it.
Then illness came, and everything shifted.
The day I thought, This is a good day because I kept breakfast down, I almost laughed out loud. Almost. I was laughing at how strange it felt to celebrate something so small. But under that absurdity was a real sense of relief. My body had worked with me. That mattered. Still, some part of me kept holding on to the old version of normal, like a photo of someone I used to know. I kept measuring the distance between who I had been and who I had become.
That distance can crush you if you let it.
Here’s what I’ve learned, slowly and with some resistance: the problem isn’t that normal changes. The problem is that we insist it shouldn’t. We cling to our old baselines, the versions of ourselves that ran errands on Saturdays, had dinner with friends, and stayed up too late talking, as if letting go means we’ve failed. It doesn’t. It only means we’re willing to tell the truth about where we are.
Adjusting isn’t surrender. I want to be clear about that, because many people hear it that way. When I stopped using my pre-treatment self to measure what I could do in a day, and started using my post-treatment self to ask what my body needed today, something changed. Not in a dramatic way. Not all at once. But the steady, low hum of failure, I should be farther along, I should feel better by now, this shouldn’t still be so hard, began to fade.
So I started to see good days in smaller pieces. Making it to the mailbox. Sitting outside for 20 minutes. Having a conversation that didn’t leave me drained. Reading three chapters instead of two. These weren’t consolation prizes. They were the real texture of my life. And they deserved to be seen for what they were, not through the warped lens of what they were not.
I think about the word calibrate a lot. Surgeons know calibration well. It’s the fine adjustment you make when an instrument starts to drift. You don’t throw the instrument away. You notice the drift, correct it, and keep going. Life with serious illness asks for the same kind of honest, repeated adjustment. Not once, but over and over. As the baseline changes and settles, and it will, some weeks are harder than others. Some months give back what other months take away. You calibrate. Then you calibrate again.
One thing that surprised other people, and surprised me too, is that a smaller good day can carry just as much meaning as a bigger one. Maybe more, because you earn your attention to it. When your world gets smaller, you start to see things in a different way. The quality of afternoon light. The warmth of a cup held in both hands. A friend showing up without being asked. Those things were always there. I had just been moving too fast to notice them.
Illness slowed me down enough to see what had been there all along.
Still, none of this is meant to make suffering sound sweet. I won’t tell you that getting sick was a blessing, because it wasn’t. Illness took things from me that I’m still grieving: stamina, certainty, and the easy way I once imagined the future. Those losses are real. They deserve to be named, not turned into some lesson about gratitude. You don’t have to be grateful for hard things. You only have to decide what to do while they’re happening.
As for me, I chose to take the day in front of me seriously. Not the day I used to have. Not the day I hope to have again. Just today, whatever it holds.
Some days, that meant a walk to the end of the driveway. Other days, it meant writing a few paragraphs. And some days, it meant nothing more than rest, real rest, without guilt, while my body quietly did its work without an audience.
I’ve come to see that normal was never a fixed place. It was always the place where I happened to be standing.
