Defining Moments (or Have You Heard Enough of This Already?)
I mentioned a few entries ago about being hesitant to bring up cancer in everyday conversations. I’d just finished a 2 mile walk with neighbors, and one of the women asked about running routines. Long story short, I felt like I couldn’t answer the question without mentioning leukemia.
A similar thing happened several months ago at a mini-conference for work. The presenter asked us to describe a recent moment where we had felt pure joy. One moment came to mind: I was walking down the fairway of Widefield Disc Golf Course. A gentle breeze sent leaves dancing across the path. My son was next to me. After several months restricted to the indoors and, for the most part, separated from my family, I was full of gratitude. Although I have always found joy on the disc golf course, this moment stood out because of its contrast to the experience that preceded it. After a moment of reflection, I mentioned hospitals and leukemia and then tried to keep the conversation moving.
Last week, one of my colleagues was complaining about an upcoming doctor’s appointment. "Yeah," I said, "I’m not looking forward to the dentist next week.” It was an offhand comment. I was worried about the appointment, but I didn’t mean to get into a deep conversation.
“Why’s that?” he asked.
I’ve been working with this particular individual for about a year, so I just assumed he knew about my diagnosis. After all, when he met me, my hair was just growing in, my body still frail from my battle with leukemia.
“Oh, chemo destroys tooth enamel. I just feel judged when I go, because there is always something wrong.”
“Chemo?” He asked, tilting his head to the side. “When did you go through that?”
I had walked into the trap of telling my story again. “I was diagnosed with leukemia in the fall of 2024...”
*****
These moments have made me consider how our unique experiences shape conversation. When something dominates our life for an extended period of time, it becomes the context in which we answer questions even when it’s not what we want to define us.
Culturally, of course, we have shared moments that function similarly. A few weeks ago, we observed the 25th anniversary of 9/11. Like others my age, I remember where I was—leaving The Muffin Man, a teashop in London—and how I found out—Dr. O’Brien, our physics professor proclaimed, “Headquarters has been attacked!” (It took a little back and forth for us to learn that he was referring to the Pentagon.)
While our individual memories of the tragedy vary, those of us who were alive and old enough to remember each have some story to tell.
Individual experiences shape conversation, but they don’t resonate with those around us in the same way.
In 2011, a few months after our June wedding, my husband and I put most of our belongings in storage and moved to the Netherlands where he had been assigned to train a new employee.
In Utrecht, I quickly picked up the Dutch words for foods during my multiple trips to the grocery store around the corner. I visited the cheese shop. I learned that I was unable to work on my travel visa. I created a blog and documented my adventures: trips to museums, visits to an Amsterdam market, walks and book club meetings with an English-speaking expat group, travels where I accompanied my husband to his work trips in England and Switzerland, a Mediterranean cruise.
The week we came back, we went to Walmart. The building was the size of several city blocks. Everyone else walked around confidently. I felt like I was in an alien land.
For the next year, I found myself repeating the phrases, “In the Netherlands…” and “When I lived abroad” over and over. I became self-conscious, trying to find other ways to answer questions.
“How was your summer?”
I thought about the month I had back in the U.S. before I started grad school: “We started house hunting.”
“Where did you move from?”
I scrambled, “Well we lived in Denton before moving abroad.”
Every question seemed to lead to the same experience. I couldn’t get away from the phrases. I tried to be non-chalant. I tried to be grateful for my experience. I tried not to brag. Or rather, I tried to present myself so that people would know that I was grateful, that I wasn’t bragging, that I didn’t think my experience was more impressive than theirs. I often thought, Have you heard enough of this already?
Eventually new experiences replaced the old. I shared classes with my fellow graduate students. I applied to the same opportunities. I suffered through Dissertation Boot Camp. I celebrated the achievements of my peers.
When I moved on to a position as Visiting Assistant Professor at Oklahoma State, my colleagues had been through versions of the same thing. It didn’t seem like too much to say, “When I was working on my PhD” or “When I taught at the University of North Texas.”
Things changed when I started working in the K-12 system. I couldn’t quite let go of the title of “doctor,” but I also found myself downplaying the experience that had dominated my last 10 years.
“Oh yeah, I used to teach college English,” I’d say, and my coworkers would assume I’d taught a concurrent enrollment class.
However, around the same time, we also had one of those big, collective memories. It was the Fall of 2021 and we were all returning to a weird new normal. There was a lot to unpack about the previous year. When I talked about my experience teaching, I could talk about it in the context of the pandemic and it became part of the larger story we were all weaving about what Covid meant to us.
Sometimes I wonder what causes me to find myself simultaneously compelled to tell my story and driven to minimize it. Perhaps it is my own anxiety or maybe there is something more to be said about a human desire to live a shared life. I wish I could end this post with a clear conclusion: a promise to myself to be more authentic or a definitive interpretation. Maybe it’s enough, for now, to say that we are defined by these moments whether we want to be or not. We can only choose to embrace or resist it.
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