This winter, it seemed to me that silver linings were popping up everywhere, like starbursts cast as fairy dust from Tinkerbell’s wand. Everyone seemed to be finding them, but few had any meaning for me. When the vaccine first became available in the new year, I was desperate to get it. Newly diagnosed with cancer, I wanted all the extra protection I could get. I have now received both vaccines and do, indeed, feel safer.

But I’m still not seeing any silver leaking from the sky. Like a horse with blinders, I can see only straight ahead, and everything leads towards a doctor’s office, hospital lab or treatment room. No sunshine, no clouds, no silver linings in any of those places.  

And yet… masks! Being immuno-suppressed from chemotherapy means I need to be wary of going out in public. I’m quite sure it never would have occurred to me before to wear a mask, but now that they are mandated, it’s become welcome silver armor for me.

Then just last week a different color lining burst through the clouds of my despair. I learned about an organization for women with breast cancer. It

I will say you can have your silver linings. Keep them. Save them for when you need them and then see how wonderful they don’t feel. 

Understand what the price of one really is. Yes, I have learned to be grateful for the small, everyday mercies. And I really am, on most days. Yes, I know others have it much worse. Yes, maybe I am stronger, wiser, kinder. But actually I won’t ever know, will I?  Because there isn’t another me to compare it to. Yes, character, courage, all those things. But what if I would have been okay–and I really think I would have been–had I been left alone without all these opportunities to offer forgiveness, and courage and the brave smile, to show love to those who had hurt me and others, not to have borne witness to how cruel people can be to one another. Especially to children. 

I’m not so much angry, really, as tired of everyone thinking they have a silver lining to offer. We don’t hold them for others, and the price is significant. Like resilience, silver linings come after pain. And often a lot of it. Decisions–with no clear path–just whatever the gamble

As we mark one year of COVID-19, I am reminded of my uncomfortable relationship with anniversaries. Cyclic completion may warrant celebration, but also self-monitoring: How many of my goals have I met this year? What have I missed? What can I do better next year? Under this lens of surveillance, any repetition can start to look like regression. Circular time, for all its recurrences and renewals, chafes against the idea of linear time, which prizes productivity, trackable progress toward an aim, a forward-looking mindset.

I have anxiety. I can freely admit it and even laugh at myself now that years and years separate my terror from my present. I can acknowledge that it is better for me to stay on an SSRI consistently after several starts and false stops over the past two decades.

I have always gone to work and cared for the children and put one foot in front of the other and put on a brave face. But I have been nearly convinced at different times over the years that I had congenital heart disease, lymphoma, esophageal/ovarian/breast/brain/pancreatic cancer, hemochromatosis, heparin-induced thrombocytopenia, multiple sclerosis, and leukemia. Sometimes I joke, “I’ve had every kind of cancer there is, even testicular cancer.” As ridiculous as it sounds, my racing mind could find a way for that to be so even with my complement of XX chromosomes.

Sometimes I have had understandable triggers for mental misery: a devastating college breakup; two miscarriages; a medical malpractice suit. At other times the panicky thoughts seem to come out of nowhere — noticing a tiny purple skin lesion or a sharp pang within my abdomen fast forwards immediately to my untimely death and my