chronic

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

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

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.”

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.”