A friend of mine, currently in the thick of his own battle with cancer, said something recently that gave me pause. We sat in a heavy silence that often follows a round of hard truths, when he confessed his belief that we are each allotted a certain, finite amount of happiness in this life.
With a hollow sort of nostalgia, he described a day from his past—a day so perfectly saturated with light and ease—that he knew he’d never reach that peak again. Now, two years into his grueling diagnosis, my friend remains convinced he’s drained his “happiness account.”
“The best is behind me,” he said. “I’ve used up my share, and now it’s time to let go.”
I balked because to someone like me, who’s been fighting stage four cancer since 2020, his words felt like lead. They held the heavy kind of pain medicine can’t touch. I looked at him and felt a desperate need to challenge his theory. So, I told him that joy and contentment are not like money in a bank; they aren’t finite resources we spend until the vault is empty.
Joy is more like air. We have to open up and accept it into our lives.
However, there is a vital distinction to be made between happiness and joy. Happiness comes and goes—often based on our reactions to circumstances. But joy? Joy requires perseverance. It is a deliberate choice, a practiced way of living that persists even when the "happiness" of our situation has evaporated.
My life has changed drastically since 2020. I am nearly always exhausted. The version of me that could sit at a desk for hours and write is gone for now. I’ve had to pivot, learning to navigate in a world that feels increasingly out of reach. I use talk-to-text now, and I rely on apps to read to me when I am too weak to even sit upright. These are different kinds of wins than the ones I used to celebrate, but they are wins nonetheless. They are the small, stubborn fires I light to keep the dark at bay.
My friend studied me after hearing this speech, his eyes searching mine. “You’ve been doing this for five years,” he asked. “How do YOU still find joy?”
I stayed quiet for a moment, then thought of my grandmother. She used to say that perseverance wasn’t just a personality trait; it was a virtue—a muscle you build through the sheer repetition of not giving up.
“It is getting harder,” I admitted. I didn’t want to give him a platitude. The longer this lasts, the more pieces of myself I seem to lose. It is aggravating, depressing, and sometimes profoundly lonely. Just last month, a dear friend of mine chose to stop her treatments. Her departure nearly broke me. Yet, even in the wreckage of that loss, there was a sliver of light. It wasn’t in her death, but in the immense privilege of having known her at all. I found a strange, grounding strength in her example—the courage it took for her to know exactly when it was time to stop.
I looked at my friend, leaning into the reality of my own timeline. “The doctors gave me two years to live back in 2020,” I said. “It’s 2026 now. I am living on borrowed time, in the 'extra' chapters of my book. If I don’t find the joy in these bonus days, wouldn’t they just be a waste?”
He nodded slowly, and in that moment, I realized that talking to him had woken me up from my own creeping slump of self-pity. We aren’t owed a single breath, let alone a perfect day. But what tips the scales in our favor is the fact that we are allowed as much joy as we can harvest, regardless of our situation.
