It’s that time of year when we are inundated with stories of women’s battles with breast cancer. I am not a fan of that metaphor. The problem with the image of a battle for illness, for pain, for cancer is that if you don’t make it, it’s as if you haven’t tried hard enough - which is ridiculous and unfair.
I prefer to externalise pain or illness. I encourage you to use metaphors that make sense to you, such as:
an unwanted guest
a stray dog
A storm
A hole in the ground
A backseat driver..
Come up with images that you can place limits on, that you can create distance from and that are separate from you.
We don’t need to turn our bodies into battlegrounds, life is hard enough as it is.
