To each their own — but not someone else’s. As one person wrote, “nobody who hasn’t been through it gets to call it a journey.”

Sontag offered a more apt metaphor than journey, though she ultimately preferred straight, unadorned talk: illness as a place , and often a dark and lonely one, “the night-side of life” in “the kingdom of the sick.”

while trivializing soul-destroying health problems, the metaphor inflates the significance of trivial ones.

The word “journey” suggests good things: “It’s the journey, not the destination!” Above all, it’s something willingly undertaken, not an abduction or a hijacking, or “a forced march,” according to one Reddit user. I doubt any trafficked persons ever described their passages into new lives as journeys. One typically chooses a journey for

Cancer with its “redemptive power” can be a “growth opportunity” allowing “creative self-transformation,” “spiritual upward mobility,” or otherwise make you a better person.

The makeover of disease with metaphoric cosmetics is not new. In her book “Illness as Metaphor,” writer and critic Susan Sontag criticized “sentimental fantasies” concocted about disease — the awful disease of tuberculosis being her historical example of “aestheticization” and “glamorization.” The European literati once portrayed tuberculosis as

The five most recent comments included “cringeworthy,” “repulsively fussy and flowery,” “pretentious,” and “yoga babble.”

People with other such complex chronic diseases, and of course cancer, also read and hear their experiences referred to as “journeys” by well-meaning sympathizers. The treacly word triggers my gag reflex, and I’m far from alone.

Sugarcoating my bitter pill, a chronic disease, by calling it a “journey” might sweeten it for you, but not for me.