It's Not All In Your Head, But Some of It Is

“A man is not hurt so much by what happens as by his opinion of what happens,” observed French philosopher Michel de Montaigne.

That doesn’t mean that the pain and suffering you experience isn’t real or that it’s all in your head.

But it does mean that you have a choice.

Let me tell you what I mean.

When I was diagnosed - especially the second time, the facts were pretty straightforward. I had cancer again, this one more serious than the first. I needed treatment that may or not be successful and it would suck.

Cold, hard reality.

What was happening to my body, however, was only half the battle. The other half was the story I was telling myself about what it all meant.

Sure, there were moments when I thought This is unfair. I did everything right. I trained hard, ate well, took care of myself. And this is what I get? My body has betrayed me. Fuck this. A natural reaction that would have weakened me.

Instead, I picked a different interpretation. I decided that all those early morning swims, those brutal bike rides, those long runs when my legs screamed at me to stop - all of that had been preparing me for exactly this moment. My training wasn’t wasted; it was prologue or prehab. My body hadn’t betrayed me; it had been quietly building the reserves I’d need to survive.

Same facts. Completely different opinion. And that difference changed everything.

That’s not to say we can just smile and skip our way through tragedy. Let me be clear: I’m not talking about toxic positivity or pretending hard things aren’t hard. The chemo was brutal, the radiation burned and I still have side effects. I worry that my cancer will come back.

Neither my opinion nor your opinion can will away cancer or fend off any of the other life challenges that are waiting just around the corner.

But here’s what it does change: your capacity to endure it.

I’ve seen this play out countless times in my work in mental health and social services. Two people can experience remarkably similar trauma - a job loss, a divorce, a health crisis - and have completely different outcomes. Not because one person’s situation was objectively better, but because of how they interpreted what was happening to them.

One person sees failure; another sees redirection. One sees ending; another sees transition. One sees evidence that the universe is against them; another sees a test they’re capable of passing.

The facts didn’t change. The opinion did. And that mindset shaped everything that came next.

This isn’t about denying reality or sugarcoating pain. It’s about recognizing that between what happens to us and how we respond to it, there’s a space. A moment. A choice. And in that space, we get to decide what story we’re going to tell ourselves about what’s happening.

Viktor Frankl, who survived Nazi concentration camps, wrote about this same idea: that the last of human freedoms is the ability to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.

When everything else has been stripped away, that choice remains.