Forget happiness, strive for aliveness
Shifting the narrative during a season of loss
IN PARTNERSHIP WITH UNLIKELY COLLABORATORSIllustrations by Chau Luong
In late 2022, I had just spent 10 months helping a family member with a life-threatening mental illness stay alive. Relieved they had found safety and stability, I exhaled for the first time in nearly a year. I distinctly remember thinking, “OK, now I can be happy – or at least focus on the worthy goal of being happy.”
Within a month, I inhaled sharply after seeing the caller ID light up my phone. Holding my breath, I knew the man on the other end of the line, the one who had recently seen me topless, was going to confirm something I already knew.
“We got the results. I’m afraid you were right,” he said. “I’m sorry to say, it turns out you do have cancer. Triple Positive Breast Cancer.”
Chao Luong
This doctor’s voice was the first empathetic one I’d heard in my journey navigating a medical system that has profoundly and repeatedly failed me. More than a decade ago, my husband was misdiagnosed and mistreated for more than a year. Just 2.5 weeks after discovering it had been a grapefruit-sized tumor all along, he died in my arms at the age of 44. The doctor on the other end of the line had kindly listened to that story as he inserted an enormous biopsy needle into my left breast only a few weeks prior. He also heard about how my lump had been misdiagnosed for more than a year, too. He sounded utterly defeated while delivering the news. Me too, man. Me too.
In the days following that call, I began to process and share the news. As I considered how to safely tell my recently stabilized family member about my diagnosis, I could feel the walls of one of my deeply held core beliefs come crumbling down.
After feeling immense and understandable rage toward the medical system failing me once again, and after crying bucket-loads of tears (perhaps more than I have since my husband died), I found myself trying to “buck-up.” I wanted to skip to the “just be happy they found it” part of my story. Just be grateful, I told myself. That’s the narrative that has guided so much of my life.
“I think I was meant to be misdiagnosed all that time so I could help keep my person alive,” I said to my best girlfriend days after receiving the news. I meant that then. And in some ways, I still believe it now. What I realized (in one of those Oprah-type “aha” moments) is that I’ve been holding onto a harmful core belief—that achieving a sustained state of happiness would mark me as a “healed” or “well” person.
Chao Luong
Still, it was also becoming clear that the chance at sustained happiness was an unreasonable and impossible goal.
As I faced a long and painful year and a half of surgeries, chemotherapy, radiation, and immunotherapy, I understood I’d need a new framework for seeing my relationship to my emotional life. Instead of striving for happiness, I discovered that the continuum that matters most in life, as a podcast guest once explained, is to move from numbness to aliveness.
You should know that I jokingly refer to this as my “Everything Everywhere All At Once” era. Just days before my first surgery, I awoke during the night to water pouring through the ceiling, destroying my brand new mattress, and causing me to evacuate into temporary housing where I had to recuperate post-surgery while they remediated the subsequent mold. Naturally, my car was burgled too.
At the same time, I was also proudly celebrating achieving lifelong dreams: I’d submitted the complete manuscript for my first book and delivered a very successful TEDx talk. Even more, I was experiencing awe and wonder in response to the moral beauty of others, including strangers, like my podcast fans supporting me in the most spectacular ways. See what I mean? Everything. Everywhere. All at once.
I can now see that it was all just a prelude to what experiencing true aliveness would require of me.
Unlike happiness, which asked me to deny the anguish and despair I was justifiably feeling, aliveness only demanded I forego the use of my familiar tools of numbing, controlling, distracting, and dissociating. Aliveness simply (or not so simply) insisted I not order my emotions à la carte. The way to feel my aliveness would be giving myself permission to feel e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g. As poet Rainier Maria Rilke wrote, “To let everything happen to you. Beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.”
With the lens of aliveness as my guiding narrative, I made a commitment to be present, to sit with the pain and grief of my diagnosis. I allowed myself to rage and cry. In equal measure, I practiced being what I call a “joy-detective,” allowing delight to dazzle my senses and inviting amazement to make me breathless from time to time. To be present to it all.
It’s been nearly two years since that call, seven months since I had my last infusion, and I continue to incorporate aliveness rituals into my daily life: beauty walks, being in nature, delivering delight to strangers in the form of flower bouquets, and more.
The most important practice—the one that helps me center aliveness in a world full of loss—is starting each day with a story that reminds me of the sacredness of life. “May I see love. May I feel love. May I radiate love. May I receive love.”
Lisa Keefauver began her career as a social worker and narrative therapist in 2004, expanding her activism through roles as clinical director, non-profit co-founder, clinical supervisor, and facilitator of personal and professional growth and healing. Lisa's grief advocacy inspired her to found Reimagining Grief, with a mission to illuminate and dismantle the limited collective story of grief that causes unnecessary suffering. It also includes the intimate work of holding space and bearing witness for people as they navigate their grief journey.
Chau Luong is a Berlin-based artist whose work distills emotional undercurrents into surreal imagery. Through bold colors and a pared-down language, she blends reality with fantasy, often veering into the uncanny.