After 14 months of biweekly chemotherapy, Michael still hopes he’ll wake up and discover he doesn’t have cancer. Rather than pathologizing this, he investigates its function. Denial, he realizes, is protective in a specific way: if you want to build a creative life, an intimate life, a professional life, “it’s really useful to not be in life or death every minute.”
Writing requires believing you have time to revise. Art-making requires believing in a future where the work matters. Denial provides the necessary fiction that there’s a later — and that fiction enables function. The dysfunction of denial is that it makes genuine choice impossible (you can’t choose chemo if you’re just desperately fleeing death). But the function is that it preserves the spaciousness needed for a meaningful life.
“If one wants to build a creative life, an intimate life, a professional life, it’s really useful to not be in life or death every minute.”
“It’s amazing — 14 months, chemo every two weeks — it’s amazing how much the mind bucks against this.”