Have you ever experienced the overuse of a word or concept? …Where the original intent of the meaning is now misused or manipulated or misrepresented or devalued due to the buzz-i-ness that it has become? …Where the immediate reaction is to roll eyes and discount it because it’s ‘tired’? …Where it’s turned into a cliché and therefore rendered avoidable because, well, ‘no one likes a cliché’? 

I see this happening with many words and concepts — Mental health. Anxiety. Trauma. Cancer. Strength. Forgiveness. Recovery. Faith. Covid. Gratitude. (And the list can go on and on) — and it made me stop and consider the issue: I think we’ve lost touch with pausing to pursue the value and purpose of words. We think too fast. We react too fast. We emote too fast. We do too fast leaving us no time to sink into the original meaning of a word. How often do you return to the dictionary and look up a word to see its original meaning? Or return to the time before the overuse took over to remind yourself of the original value? 

TBH, I have, too, wrestled with all of these words and a knee-jerk response to them, but there is one in particular that is most complex — Resilience. I see it all over my breast cancer world used to describe the warriors, synonymous with the stereotypically flexed bicep. Its overuse creating almost a bitterness towards it…many of us “warriors” so sick of having to be resilient or being told we are resilient or being expected to be resilient because that’s what warriors have to be to be victorious. It’s overused, devaluing and discounting its original intent. It’s a word easily manipulated to be a passive aggressive inspiration because there is just no room for authentic weakness and brokenness. It’s become buzzy and cliché. And so very far from its OG.

---

I had surgery yesterday, number 12 in this breast cancer story of mine. It had been two years since my last one. The reconstruction process I chose is intense and long-winded…bringing with it the complicated nature of having to make a life-altering decision in the matter of days at the front end of all of this in 2017; the complexity of permanence ‘cuz once the train leaves the station, it’s hard to stop it; the immense efforts of both me and my surgeon; the ‘what I think I wants’ without *really* knowing what it is that I want because why would anyone really know what they want when body parts have to be amputated without a choice?; the regrets that come with a rear-view mirror. Ugh. Hindsight – I make a totally (literally) opposite decision.

Anyways, here I am again. Recovering from a stupid-painful, on the excruciating scale, recon surgery. Triggered yesterday in very devastating and depressing ways. Not quite getting the surgery I wanted because my surgeon isn’t ready to deconstruct everything even though that would make my life easier. The desperation of settling and doing it his way because at the very least, getting those wretched implants out was the priority, crossing my fingers on the 50/50 chance it’s been them making me so sick 4 years post-diagnosis. 

So here, in this present recovery, lying in bed hardly able to move without level-9 pain, the word “resilient” is ringing loud in my head. But I’m pausing from the knee-jerk, choosing to listen, not to the overused version, but the original version. The Webster’s Dictionary version. The version that I’ve always appreciated and found inspiring in a non-manipulated way because I know its intent. And by being resilient, I am proving its labor. It’s significance. It’s value. (Look it up, the words used to define it are absolutely and agreeably powerful!). And, I’m honoring myself and my painful story by choosing to be smack-dab in the middle of the word. 

---

Are there certain words for you that could benefit from returning to their original, non-overused, un-buzzed meanings? Could that, in fact, become a healthy practice where instead of the automatic eye-roll, it’s the intentional choice to call out what it really means? 

Cancer teaches me things . . . a lot of things.