When I was sick, as if to cling to something that would speak to me in a language that would reach me, I reread all of Marie Uguay. Like a no-brainer, some would say, like a last floor before the big nothing, for me. Obviously I had been offered all the books that urged me to eat better, to cut out sugar, to do yoga from morning to night, to do things better, or differently. But for me, all that interested me was to comfort myself with the words of these people who had, like me, passed through the mirror of invincibility, to find themselves on the other side of the world, the one who Nobody cares, where all the vulnerable parts of our human condition are concentrated.
I talked with these books for hours, in my thoughts in my big bed, delighting in these imaginary exchanges which I preferred a hundred times over the sterile exchanges with the real people I met in the grocery aisles and who never knew what to do with my scarf on my head, my children who are too young, my husband surrounded and my credit cards which are draining what they can. I needed to feel that I belonged to a world in which there was still life, to “stay alive until death”, like Paul Ricoeur, whom I also discovered during my illness. I read Marie’s diary, especially the one she had written on her return to the hospital to “abolish time, create space” and “not to lose everything”. I read it for these same reasons. “A whole landscape calls to me, of spaced mountains, of living lakes, of attentive conifers, where time would no longer have a burden, diluted by numberless space. And I, surveying the supple clarity with my eyes, would be as if washed from within my illness, asleep in the comforting words of the wind,” she wrote.
I often visualized the doses of poison received as a strong cleanser, which would “wash me from the inside of my illness”, sorting out the cells, sparing those which still resisted the madness, but shamelessly destroying all those which had generated this death squad which had transformed my 40th birthday into a sinister celebration.
The big housekeeping had thus initially been cellular. And completely suffered. I had done nothing better than not die. The real cleaning, the big cleaning of what could be seen as the second spring of my life, is happening now, I believe. I often joke that cancer will not steal my favorite crisis, that of the middle of life!
It is true that this crisis, acting like a jolt of the soul which screams within us something like “you are not going to continue the journey without me”, has always fascinated me, interested me, touched me deeply. Whether it is experienced at 35, 40 or 50 years old, whether it unfolds in flamboyant mode or in pearl mode over years, it presents itself as this magnificent resumption of power of the authentic over the artificial. Like this internal revolution which throws us into unhappiness, as long as we have not taken our psyche head on, until we have admitted to ourselves in a whisper what we are refusing to ourselves. to see, that we will not be both carried and thrown into the world saying “that’s me!” “.
I love this crisis because it is complete, tenacious and multicolored, encompassing both the cliché of this woman who would throw away her husband and children to go make love from morning to evening with a lover worthy of the name, and this a man who would take charge of his desire for interiority by only starting to read poetry, going to the theater and daring to cry in front of the children’s films that he would watch with his 7-year-old daughter.
It’s the crisis of spring cleaning, which requires us to open the shutters, to let the light in, to put all the energy of which we are capable into arranging our interior space in a way that would no longer compress us. It reminds us that we are much broader, much more complex, than we believe, and that the time we presume to have ahead of us is already starting to shrink, reminding us that this is life now, not so long. , when you think about it. Precisely, beyond all its folkloric representations, the mid-life crisis is first and foremost a crisis of reflection, of sorting, of the careful cleaning of the spaces that make up our inner world.
It is when action overturns everything, without allowing time for self-reflection, that the mid-life crisis becomes potentially destructive. It can become chaos without reconstruction, leaving impressions of fragments on the lives of those who do it in this way, which then provide material for regrets. It sometimes undoes couples who, perhaps, could have given themselves a breathing space, a right to destroy without destroying everything. She sometimes creates blended families in haste, which will never stick together. It sometimes sows some heavy losses along its path, as long as we have not taken the time to grasp its deep message, which is above all a message of authenticity, of liberation from a few layers of ego. Although pleasure and enjoyment hold an important place, it is above all a crisis which forces courage, the one which demands from us to accept ourselves as we are, in this existence which is ours, not that of the neighbor.
So, for me, it seems that it is only now, as the worst winter of my life ends, that my body is finally acclimatizing to all the medications that it is still ingesting by the ton, that I I almost believe myself when I start to hope that the oncologist has forgotten my name, that I am gradually forgetting my hospital card number. It seems to me that, yes, it is only now that my feet are rooted in the earth again. Spring cleaning begins and I let myself clean from within again, but differently this time. Like the Psyche of the myth, here I am rather accepting the condemnation of a different sorting: that of relationships, layers of identity, vital impulses, errors, the future and the desires it contains. Spring cleanings are sometimes gentle, long and silent, in no way saving us from the mourning, breakups and reversals that are invited there.
And while I’m cleaning, it seems to me that the light is already coming in better.