What You Focus on Shapes Your Mental and Emotional Landscape

I recently wrote a piece on this site about Breasts and Cancer. I don't talk that much about it, but cancer, especially breast cancer, runs in my family and has significantly impacted my life.

My mother had breast cancer at least twice and died of a different cancer. My sister had breast cancer and other cancers multiple times and I took care of her following her first mastectomy. 

My mother came from a large family and one of her sisters lived down the street from us and survived uterine cancer. She had other relatives who had cancer and sometimes died of it, but I typically didn't know them well. My mom's mom died of uterine cancer more than a decade before I was born.

I once had a physician say to me "With your family history of breast and uterine cancer, I don't know why you were ever put on hormonal birth control pills." That was a factor in my husband deciding to get a vasectomy when I began getting migraines from birth control pills and chose to discontinue them forever and ever and ever.

My understanding is my sister has had cancer so many times, she still wears wigs because her hair fell out repeatedly and some of it never grew back. She's probably more scarred up and physically impaired from her health problems than I am.

I wouldn't trade my life and health problems for hers, though she got the spiffy serious career I wanted and I spent many years jealous of her and feeling like a failure in comparison. Her dire health problems are a factor in me speculating on other blogs that her career success may not be what it seems to be and a lot of what I believed to be true about her life is likely not as it seems.

I would rather raise another child who is a surprise package I wasn't planning than go through what my sister went through, which I witnessed firsthand to some degree. I'm celibate for medical reasons and have been for 21 years in part because of this question of birth control. 

So breast cancer in my family shapes important health decisions of mine and has had a larger impact on reproductive thought processes than my genetic disorder, in part because I was diagnosed late in life, well after having two children and deciding to stop there and not have the third child I wanted because of my fragile health.

I didn't have the energy to raise three kids, so I chose to not have a third child though my husband was willing to give me another child. He only wanted two, but he had wanted a boy and a girl and we have two sons. So he told me we can have a third and hope for a girl.

I said "No."

Given that family history, I tend to notice when celebrities talk about breast cancer. In her youth, Madonna was open about her mother dying young of breast cancer, though Wikipedia only says:

When Madonna was five years old, her mother died of breast cancer on December 1, 1963.

My recollection is her mother was in her thirties when she died and this detail features prominently in some of Madonna's songs and the videos made about them. It's been said she lived "frantically" until she was past the age her mother died, and then calmed down.

My understanding is she had her first child after that. A calculator suggests she was probably 38 because Lourdes is currently 29 and Madonna is 67. She stopped worrying she would the age her mother died and felt comfortable having kids.

In contrast, Angelina Jolie is continuing to make a spectacle of her family history of breast cancer. And just like I was concerned about her writing about her medical choice to remove both breasts and then make a big deal of that, I'm concerned about what she's doing now.

Angelina Jolie is making a much bigger deal about female relatives dying in their fifties than Madonna made of her mother dying in her in her thirties. She's making a much more tragic story out of her mother only being there for this birth of her first child than Madonna has ever made of her mother dying long before she was reproductive age at all.

Famous actresses are defacto role models for a great many other women and our click bait world gives a lot of attention to people engaging in psycho behavior and I don't know how to remedy this.

I think a lot about this issue in terms of clothes, fashion, beauty, furniture and similar. I complain at times about how anything in those genres that gets successful and monied becomes scenery porn, like HGTV losing it's This Old House vibe and becoming Lifestyles of the Rich and Shameless, to quote a favorite movie line mocking an old show whose real name was Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.

I sometimes think and write about it in terms of role models for the LGBTQ community. Your best LGBTQ role models may be people you don't readily realize are one of you because they aren't making a spectacle of that fact.

In our attention economy, this kind of drama queen antics gets a lot more eyes on it and a lot more influence than people with healthier attitudes who handle their personal dranas more quietly and with more dignity.

I don't know why Angelina Jolie had a falling out with her famous father and then chose to also go into acting, making that feud a central part of her public reputation.

I don't know why she chose to get knocked up with a baby by a married costar -- Brad Pitt -- she was having an affair with, apparently without asking his permission.

The narrative the world has heard is she pursued Brad Pitt hard. I've seen videos recently on YouTube with titles about how adoringly she looked at him when they were first together.

And now he's being painted as the villain who drinks too much and behaves badly because of it while her children follow in her footsteps of publicly rejecting their father while choosing to pursue careers in the entertainment industry, guaranteeing that their family feud will never be a private matter and will be a central detail of their public reputations for probably the rest of their lives exactly like their mom's story.

That looks suspiciously like Angelina Jolie is engineering this repeat pattern in her life.

And today I'm reading about how she has this extremely dysfunctional relationship to reproductive morality and her own fears about her mortality and her children are supposedly rallying around her and helping her live a little while she makes dreading her death a routine central emotional burden for them.

My sons stood by me and nursed me back to health after doctors and the world wrote me off for dead. And when my very difficult oldest son was four, I told him one day "If you are counting on mom ALWAYS handling certain things, that's a bad plan. I'm likely to die before you." And he has told me that's why he tried as hard as he did for some things he found difficult.

No one lives forever. We all need to prepare our children for life without us someday.

The article posits we all assume we will live to old age and see grandchildren. That's not what I know of reality.

I read an article about a soldier who fathered a child with each deployment to a war zone, terrified he was not going to come back. I and my husband partied like there's no tomorrow for three weeks between the time we were informed of his upcoming deployment to a war zone and the day he left.

Working class people tend to have shorter lives than upper class people. Black Americans live less long than White Americans.

This is an extremely narcissistic attitude that her fear of death is some special burden no one else endures and it's not written in a fashion that sounds at all useful to other people.

This kind of garbage is part of why I mostly don't read the news. It trends towards being click bait bad news and when the dire predictions of global environmental disaster from, say, the Kuwait oil fires is wrapped up far quicker than predicted, averting the worst expected outcomes, we don't place the equivalent positive emotional energy into celebrating that.

We collectively forget and then people tell me to my face I'm unrealistically optimistic and the world is CLEARLY DOOMED.

No, YOU think it is. Because YOU read crap like Angelina Jolie creating stupid levels of emotional drama and fail to notice Madonna and countless not famous women quietly dealing with their big feels and getting on with life.