XXII: One year, faded
In psychology there’s a phenomenon called the fading affect bias. It describes the way that the emotions tied to negative memories tend to fade more quickly than those tied to positive memories. It doesn’t necessarily mean that the negative memories are wiped from our brains, but that the intensity of the negative emotions associated with them prove more fleeting in comparison with positive emotions associated with more pleasant memories…
In the early hours of June 24th 2019, exactly one year ago to the day, I was diagnosed with recurrent Hodgkin Lymphoma. The past year has been the strangest, most challenging, and quite frankly bizarre of my entire life.
The first eight months saw my personal world turned upside down while the rest of the world continued on — largely oblivious to my individual trials and tribulations. As I underwent endoscopic and surgical biopsies, four rounds of salvage chemotherapy, and finally a three-week hospital stay for stem cell transplant people carried on as normal — shaking hands, congregating together in restaurants, breweries, and attending sporting events. While it was frustrating at times to be limited or excluded from the life everyone else seemed to be living, in a way the “normal” world surrounding me was somewhat grounding.
Then, just a couple weeks after celebrating 100 days post stem cell transplant, the entire dynamic was inverted. Suddenly just as my life was getting back to normal — no weekly labs, my exercise endurance was improving, I was cleared to go back to work — COVID struck. As I continued to feel increasingly normal, the world became increasingly less so. I watched in a combination of frustration and bemusement as society was pushed to embrace the same sort of social distancing that had come to be familiar to me in the months prior.
You’d think that it would be less frustrating to social distance when the rest of society was in the same boat. And while there were elements of “all being in it together” during the first few months, I honestly found it easier in the months after my stem cell transplant when there were sporting events to distract me and there wasn’t the looming threat of some yet-to-be fully understood pandemic.
As challenging as this past year has been, its funny how looking back the memories that jump out from the past 12 months aren’t the bad ones. When I think of this past fall the good memories both predominate and feel more vivid.
…Hiking Old Rag on an unusually cool September afternoon, escaping to the North Carolina mountains over Labor Day and watching UNC football upset South Carolina, wandering around the Charlottesville City Market on a sunny Saturday morning, taking in the fall colors on Skyline Drive in Shenandoah National Park with my parents…
Amazingly even when recalling my three-week admission for stem cell transplant.
…Watching TV shows on my iPad with Brooke when she got off work, my mom bringing me cold smoothies, watching Cole Anthony score 34 points in his UNC debut, getting a personal letter from Roy Williams, jogging a mile on my “rest day”…
Even with COVID, when I think back to the early months my mind doesn’t jump to anxieties about what would happen if I got COVID, whether packages in the mail posed a risk of carrying the virus, or whether we were about to plunge into another great depression.
Instead I think of puzzling, watching old NCAA tournament games, and beating Super Mario Odyssey in co-op mode with Brooke.
If you were to say “the fact you remember those things is a reflection of privilege” you’d be at least in part right. I’m fortunate to have good health insurance, a home situation and family support conducive to getting me through the most tenuous parts of stem cell transplant, economic security throughout both that process and the pandemic, and a job that is very compatible with social distancing. I also strictly followed the rules and put a lot of effort into recovery on my own, but no doubt all of those things helped me get through more smoothly and perhaps made it easier to look on the bright side.
But it would be foolish to overlook the power of the fading affect bias. While it might result in a more pollyannish view of the past, it also is part of what makes us resilient as humans.
Twelve months have past. The past year left its scars, both literal and figurative.
But, when I look back, the happy memories shine brightest.
