One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

Photo: Sisyphus by Titian from Wikipedia.

These last few weeks have been *hard*. 

This is a relative term, and probably in the scheme of things (including the events that have taken place in my own life), it isn’t much, but my body and mind have felt battered for most of March. It’s a result of a combination of factors - me taking on more than I probably can manage at this point; a sleep schedule that has gone completely off-course because of professional commitments; the heat that is making itself very present in Singapore; my patterns of self-criticism and self-shaming being at an all time high, etc, etc. I have had many nights in March where I’ve pushed myself to the point of exhaustion that I was unable to even form coherent sentences, and would trail off into silence in the middle of a conversation with my husband. On the harder days, I would find my mind completely blanking or my words slurring ever so slightly. 

As someone who has an extremely intimate (but not necessarily always loving) relationship with my somatic self, I can recognise all of these signs as the red flags that they are. My body has had enough, and while my mind intents on charging ahead like a bull, as it is always wont to do, my body is now having none of this. 

Stop, it says. You have to stop. You’re no longer the same. 

March is also an interesting season for me because this time last year, I was in the throes of chemotherapy. A few days ago, I was looking through some of the writing I did during that time. Most of them were personal journal entries, handwritten in scrawls, sometimes the words fading completely because I had been too tired and weak to even hold a pen properly. 

Here are snippets [edited for clarity]: 

“My body no longer feels like my own. Will this ever change?”

“I don’t understand time anymore. It is too difficult for me to keep a tight grasp of it. Sometimes, time passes by so slowly, each excruciating second forcing me to reckon with all the ways in which my body is being broken down to kill the disease that it may or may not carry. Other times, it passes by so quickly, I never thought I would get to my second cycle, but here we are.”

“Today, the pain is indescribable. I spent so much of my day crying, only because there was no other way for me to release the physical pain. Every drug I take sets off a chain reaction in my body, creating more whorls of complications and side effects. No more!”

“My nails are blue today. I have read about this happening, but to see this in person, it is mortifying, but also hilarious. I was showing P and laughing, and to his credit, he didn’t bat an eyelid. He’s used to my ways now. A few hours later, when I was staring at my dying nails, I led out a dry sob. The laughter earlier was probably masking the sorrow. It’s always masking something.”

And they go on, and on, circular thought patterns philosophising life and death, exclamations of pain and sorrow, factual records of the state of my body and mind. 

A year later, many things are different, and yet, not. I am on longer-term medication, which involves me popping a pill every day, and getting a jab that bruises me every few months. I go for blood tests, I take my weight, I have discussions with my oncologist and naturopath and therapists about my blood results, and then we take a deep breath and soldier on till the next time. In between all of this, life continues to happen, in all its haphazard ways. 

I try to do so much to remind myself that I still can, though increasingly, it becomes clear that it comes at a cost. 

In the last week alone, I’ve had three different instances of friends and strangers come to me to tell me about how someone they know, or someone they love, has been diagnosed with cancer. Each time I hear it, I feel a stab of sorrow in my sternum, the sorrow that does not come from a place of pity, but from a place of understanding, as someone who has stumbled along this path (and in some ways, is still picking her way through) and who has a vague idea of all the rocks and boulders that have to be assailed to make it to the other side. If making it to the other side is even on the cards. 

Rocks and boulders have been on my mind lately. 

I attended a breast cancer advocacy event on Friday, and was asked to leave the audience with an inspiring thought, or a piece of advice. First, I laughed, because if you know me, you know that I do not believe in positive-washing sorrow and grief. So in true Arathi fashion, I said that I do not have anything inspiring to share, but I do have something that feels very real, and perhaps that’s more useful to the audience. 

And I spoke about Sisyphus and Albert Camus. I didn’t have enough time to go into the nitty gritty of what I really wanted to share, but I had written some notes and felt that I could always write more in my Substack. 

So here we are. 

To write this, I had to read several versions of Sisyphus’s story because I realised that while I bandied around the term “Sisyphean” often, I was not entirely sure about all the details of his tale. 

This is how it goes. 

Sisyphus (or Sisyphos) is a Greek mythological figure. In Homer’s Iliad, Book VI, Sisyphus lived in Ephyre (later Corinth; some versions claim he was the King of Corinth), son of Aeolus (eponymous ancestor of the Aeolians) and the father of Glaucus. He was infamous for his trickery and wicked intelligence, but his greatest feat (and what he was eventually punished for) was cheating death and Hades not once, but twice. 

In Iliad, he is described as “the most cunning of men”. 

The first time, King Sisyphus, after dying and descending into Hades, captured Thanatos (the personification of death) and chained him up, ensuring that no humans died thereafter. Naturally, this angered Ares, the god of war, because battles had lost their “fun” and Ares’s opponents would not die. An exasperated Ares intervened, freeing Thanatos and turned Sisyphus over to him. 

After dying for the second time, and once again finding himself in Hades, Sisyphus persuaded the King of the Underworld to release him to the land of living. Before he had died, Sisyphus had instructed his wife, Merope, not to perform the usual sacrifices upon his death and to leave his body unburied (in some versions, the details are more graphic - Sisyphus had asked his wife to throw his naked body in the public square). In the underworld, Sisyphus allegedly complained to Persephone that this was a sign of his wife’s disrespect, and that he needed to return to the land of the living to discipline Merope. Naturally, once released, Sisyphus made no attempt to return to Hades and lived to a ripe old age. 

Finally, Sisyphus had to die again for the third time, and now, Zeus, the King of Gods intervened. To ensure that no other human would be encouraged by the feats of Sisyphus, Zeus thought up a punishment that would be long, tedious and hopeless. 

In Homer’s Odyssey, the hero Odysseus chancing upon Sisyphus, describes his punishment thus: “Then I witnessed the torture of Sisyphus, as he wrestled with a huge rock with both hands. Bracing himself and thrusting with hands and feet he pushed the boulder uphill to the top. But every time, as he was about to send it toppling over the crest, its sheer weight turned it back, and once again towards the plain the pitiless rock rolled down. So once more he had to wrestle with the thing and push it up, while the sweat poured from his limbs and the dust rose high above his head”. 

And so, Sisyphus was doomed to endlessly push a boulder up a steep hill in Tartarus, resigned to an eternity of useless efforts and unending frustration. 

The term Sisyphean thus describes a task that is impossible to complete, and utterly futile. 

Being hyper-aware of one’s mortality feels Sisyphean on many days. 

I suppose a part of this is because disease strips you of the innocence, the naive infallibility that you carry in your youth, this idea of time that seems almost expansive, that there is always a chance to do something tomorrow. With disease, when that naïveté is peeled away from you, you’re aware of how limited your time is, and yet how much of that limited time is spent doing things and participating in capitalist posturing that seems pointless at best. 

As I was turning over the tale of Sisyphus in my mind, I chanced upon Albert Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus. In his essay, Camus provides an alternative way of thinking about Sisyphus’s story. Camus uses Sisyphus’s tale as a metaphor for the human condition and the pursuit of meaning in a seemingly indifferent universe. And yet, and yet, he offers us a way out of hopelessness, suggesting that to survive the Sisyphean task of living, one must learn to appreciate the absurdity that comes with it. He exalts the need for an appreciation of the mundane, something that will eventually lead to a state of contentment or even happiness, as it allows the individual to live life in its entirety, without needing to seek external validation or meaning. 

Reading Camus’s essay felt like chancing across the scent of lilies on a muggy, arid, stifling day. Camus’s offering, this idea of relishing moments of absurdity despite the challenges of life, finding those brief seasons of respite and contentment, collecting them in glass bottles for days when it all becomes too much, feels like something I can do, despite my own Sisyphean existence. Because the truth is, there will be days when it is all too much and it feels like there is no point to any of this living business. Remembering that this too, is part of the natural process, part of rolling that boulder up the hill, feels almost encouraging. 

And so I conclude this missive with Camus’s words, in hopes that it will leave you with a smile on your face, as it did mine. 

One must imagine Sisyphus happy.