A whole new life

I'm so full of beans today, I don't know why, particularly, but why not? I've started waking up early for some reason so I got up and finished a painting by 8.30am. I'll post a picture once it's dried.
I've just finished a memoir by Reynolds Price called A Whole New Life about his battle with spinal cancer. Considering the fact he ends the book a paraplegic, the title is bold and affirming. It's always nice to read memoirs by people whose vocation is writing.
There were lots of passages in the book that made me nod and say 'hmm'. One is his mulling over why it took him three years of intense pain and useless drugs, after the initial cancer had been beaten back, to pursue an earlier suggestion to try biofeedback and hypnosis (both of which end up helping him tremendously). He wonders if he developed an "appetite for tension" that caused him to "wallow awhile in masochism". He writes (151),

There'd been moments, earlier on, of somber enjoyment in hearing my friends mint words like courage and heroism for me. Was I reluctant now to risk the loss of "heroic" stature? It had been a welcome novelty for the old ex-playground butterfingers, the man who'd never gone to war. My later talks with chronic-pain veterans have strongly suggested that, yes, there's a vicious and strong temptation to nurture the hurt we wail about. The hurting has so nearly become us - become the whole core of our present self - that the thought of finally dismissing it from us feels scarily like desertion or killing.

Now obviously my troubles and woes are nothing compared to spinal cancer, but I can relate to the odd wish to hang on to the labels, to the pain, even. If I say, 'well, I have PTSD' or 'I have thoracic outlet syndrome from a whiplash injury' it all sounds so grand and I have a Dramatic Thing attached to me. If I acknowledge that both of these barely ever trouble me, then I'm nobody interesting, I'm just 'normal'. But at the same time, I am set free to reclaim my own whole new life, and set about giving it meaning that isn't centred on a negative experience or reined in by probably partly imagined boundaries set by my medical labels. This isn't to say I don't get emotionally overwraught by impossibly small things, on occasion, nor that I don't have to stretch out my shoulders and back daily. But all this to say, I found this passage inspired me to claim my health and my life. To dare to be normal. To get up early and paint.