Everything Doesn’t Happen for a Reason

Everything Doesn’t Happen for a Reason, Especially When it Comes to Cancer

It may be common to tell someone struggling with a cancer diagnosis that “everything happens for a reason,” but I don’t agree and think it is a rather rude thing to say, at least for my type of cancer.

I was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma in March 2022, and it certainly would not have comforted me to hear from someone that it happened for a reason. No doctor could tell me why I got Hodgkin’s Lymphoma or what I could do to prevent it from happening again. If there was a reason for it happening, I don’t know what it was and it was a bad reason. I did not deserve Hodgkin’s Lymphoma.

My doctor told me that without cancer my body was rather healthy. Hodgkin’s Lymphoma is an incredibly difficult disease to recover from, even with successful treatment. Chemotherapy treatment took months, it shattered all my nerves, it weakened my body and after treatment I had PTSD. The pain coming with treatment is chronic and on another level from anything else I’ve ever experienced. The last three years of my life has been made so much harder in so many ways and there seems to be no reason at all for it.

I don’t think everything happens for a reason. Some things may happen for a reason, and other things like wars, famine, cancer and pencils that are too short to use happen for no reason at all.

We are only given one life, so instead of creating a tear-water-tea out of the sad things that happen to us, I believe in fighting to make every day better and worth living. I do my best to get the most out of every day I have because as a cancer survivor I know my most precious asset is not money but time. I would love to have infinite time to be alive and to thrive, but cancer has given me a first-hand experience in the mortality of human life. I don’t expect to life forever.

A better way to rephrase “everything happens for a reason,” would be to say that “some things are unexplained.” In our head we try to justify our experiences both good and bad and explain why they happened to us. People are looking for justifications for everything and want answers for the Why? question. A normal human emotion after the fact is to reflect on experiences both good and bad and justify them. While that may be good for positive experiences because we want to know what we can do to repeat them, it isn’t helpful for negative experiences like cancer where we don’t know why they happened, and we are trying to make up an explanation to avoid them from recurring.

The best thing I do is not look for reasons for why I got cancer but first focus on what I can do to get treated and then what I can do after treatment to retake my life and live the best life possible so that I make life worth living even after experiencing all the pain of treatment.

I think back at my life before cancer and all the realistic goals I had in mind for my life, and I think that cancer treatment gave me more time to be alive and more opportunities to achieve the things I want to do.

I can explain why some things happen, some things happen for a reason, but other things happen, and we have no reason for why they happened at all.