It’s an odd sensation to think about happiness as one experiences a cancer diagnosis. Over the summer during an unexpected two-night stint in the hospital due to a GI virus, doctors found a lesion on my bladder that, through the next two to three months of testing, turned out to be stage one bladder cancer. Luckily, the cancer is now out of my body, the recovery from surgery and chemo was pretty straightforward, and I’m back to work and school. And, yet, I had cancer. The thought hovers in my psyche, always reminding me of what has been and what could be especially since this cancer could come back. I was much younger than the average person diagnosed with this form of cancer, so it’s hard to not think about all the time ahead of me where cancer could come back. As my doctor has reminded me, “Once a cancer patient, always a cancer patient.” Although he assures me that I am good, I don’t buy it, at least not yet.

Perhaps to no one’s surprise, this process has been arduous, uncertain, and exhaustingly emotional. For two months, I’d been feeling pressure and blockage every time I went to the bathroom. Imagine cramping and bloating in your bladder all at the same time. Then imagine adding seven minutes to every bathroom trip because of how long it took to feel “empty.” On top of the physical pain was the mental weight of not knowing, of living constantly in a future filled with tests, pain, and possibly death. By the time my doctor diagnosed me, I’d been living as if I had cancer for almost a month. Knowing at least four people who have died from sudden onsets of cancer, I felt threatened and tired and cheated. And, yet, I also felt something else.

When the doctor confirmed what I had suspected for a while, that what I had was cancer, I felt…relieved? Acknowledged? Dare I say, happy? To be clear, I wasn’t grateful for the cancer. I wasn’t one of those people saying that cancer was a blessing in disguise or that I was being chosen for a special challenge from God as a result of my faithfulness. Instead, hearing it out loud gave me the chance to be with it. For two months, I’d lived in a future that had not yet arrived, a future deprived of happiness, joy, and peace. And I started to wonder why it was so much easier to live in a future of pain than in a present of uncertainty. After all, isn’t the uncertainty ultimately a fear of a bad outcome? How was the projected outcome more consoling than sitting in the unknown? This only became clear to me after sharing my diagnosis with family and close friends.

Something odd happened every time I would tell someone. As I said the word “cancer,” I would either get some exclamation of grief or surprise, or people would interrupt me to tell me that it couldn’t possibly be true. I knew that the word was triggering, but I wasn’t prepared for the emotional labor I would have to do to make sure that my loved ones felt supported, that I didn’t ruin their happiness. The peace and the calm that I began to feel as reality settled in stirred up so much resistance in a lot of my loved ones. To be clear, I’m not trying to blame or shame them. This was hard for everyone involved; I just didn’t realize that the cancer itself would be one of the easiest parts of my journey. In particular, I couldn’t say the word around certain family members or friends. If I said “cancer,” people would instinctively close their eyes or say that they didn’t want to talk about it. That it was “too hard.” Even worse was when people tried to ignore what I was sharing to make me “feel better,” to make me happier.

It hurt to experience that, because all I was hearing was that I was making everyone around me unhappy just by acknowledging my reality, just by being. And I started to realize that what made living in the present so hard was the constant threat of losing happiness. At least in a future that was unhappy, I could lean into that reality and strategize ways to get that happiness back. But if happiness is always on the edge of destruction, then it would seem I, too, am always on the edge of destruction. As I laid on my parents’ couch recovering from the first surgery, I started to wonder what a life that didn’t need happiness would look like. What is a life like if I can simply be where I am and acknowledge the multitude of options that come from that being? Not scared or hopeful but merely present with potential.

In asking the question, my memory gave me an answer. That moment in the doctor’s office when he told me he was sure it was cancer was the closest thing I had come to in simply being. It wasn’t that I felt good about the cancer or that I had it all figured out. Rather, it was an ability to see that thing for what it was, just one of many experiences in my life that would change me in some way not yet known to me. It was still hard and scary, but it was. Sara Ahmed calls this experience “happenstance,” which means embracing both what is and what could be (“Promise” 219). But this isn’t a passive process. Ahmed reminds us that “happenstance” comes from the word “hap,” which offers an entirely new way of orienting ourselves to the world:

To be full of hap is to make happen. A politics of the hap is about opening possibilities or being in other ways, of being perhaps. If opening up possibility causes unhappiness, then a politics of the hap will be thought of as unhappy. But it is not just that. A politics of the hap might embrace what happens, but it also works towards a world in which things can happen in alternative ways. To make hap is to make a world. (223)

To live in hap, then, is to make a world. Instead of viewing our lives as future-oriented toward a goal of happiness, hap offers us a chance to live and make our lives now with multitudes of possibilities available to us in the future. And we participate in those possibilities to make something new to what once was. In other words, living in hap is to make happen. And that’s been the single greatest tool I’ve had with me during this journey. People often commented on how “calm” or “at peace” I seemed, but I was really just hap to my cancer. The mindset that got me through multiple scans and tests, two surgeries, and a bout of chemo was the acknowledgment that I had cancer and the decision to choose procedures and circumstances that would, hopefully, allow me to beat that cancer. And when I felt relieved, I named it. When I felt tired, I named it. When I felt scared or hopeless or uncertain, I named it. And I challenged my loved ones to name it, too; or, at least, to hear me out when I did the naming.

So, I’d like to edit an earlier statement. When I was diagnosed with cancer, I felt happy hap. And now that I have a clean bill of health, it would seem like the ideal time live in hap. But as Ahmed reminds us, this is a process of creating and doing. Wrestling with a combination of anxiety and survivor’s guilt, I’m only now feeling the emotional weight of all that I’ve carried for almost six months. And it’s hard. Many times, I still find myself doing the future-fantasizing, worrying how I’ll keep myself happy. But this time, I also have hap. I don’t always remember it or use it correctly, but I have it. And who knows? Maybe a little hap in my step will be just what the doctor ordered.