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.”

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 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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.”