Foreigner

Chronic illness robs us of our identity, hopes, and dreams. Once the diagnosis is pronounced we will never be the same again. Susan Sontag in her book, Illness as Metaphor, writes that when we are diagnosed we become citizens of the land of the sick, only visiting the land of the well on a passport. We are foreigners in their world.

Once we identified ourselves by our work, relationships and hobbies, now we identify ourselves as having the Disease. The Disease is the last thing on our minds when we fall asleep and the first thing on our minds when we wake up. Our hopes and dreams for the future are dashed. Our identity is gone. Without that identity, we are strangers to ourselves and to the people with whom we had relationships. We feel like strangers because we are strangers.

But the loss of identity gives us an opportunity to create a new identity, a new normal. Stripped of our identity as human “doings” we can learn to be human “beings.”