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It’s hard to write about grief or sadness without sounding like your whole world is falling apart.

People read the words and project their own experiences on top of yours, like a picture jam in an old-school slide show. Suddenly Uncle Karl and Auntie Betty’s trip to the Adirondacks ends up in the bathtub with the kids.

I don’t know how to explain to you that even when things hurt, hurt, hurt, I’m fine. I go through the day smiling and laughing and dancing to Phil Collins songs in grocery stores and compulsively eating sugar peas out of the fridge, and you probably wouldn’t even know there was anything wrong.

And it’s not fake. I’m not putting it on. There’s something wrong, but it’s not all wrong.

I’ve been All Wrong. I know how that feels. But this isn’t it.

I’m blessed in so many ways with my family, my friends, my home, my work, and I can’t really get away from feeling thankful for those things. Relaxing with friends at a benefit pub night. Talking in silly, high-pitched voices with my roommate. Making fun of my dad on the phone. Looking at the stars from my deck. Slipping pillows into fresh, crisp cases right before I hop into bed. It’s all goodness. It’s all abundance.

I know what I have that few other people have, and that’s comfort. In my world, in my skin. Not always in my skin, but much of the time, enough of the time.

Still, in the midst of that, there is walking through loss, and the sense that my body is not as it should be, that there is pain I’m not used to, and a bit of a haze about what’s next. I mean, I know what’s next. There is the medication, there is the bone scan, there is the long-term planning, there is the prevention. There are the conversations about what has changed, what I must accept.

There is the future of the worst conversation, the one I dreaded right away, where I tell someone I love more than life that I will give them every bit of myself, but that there’s something they need to know, something that isn’t the end of the world but might make certain things we plan for a bit more complicated.

Complicated is what it is. That’s the best word for it. You have to hang on to perspective without diminishing the impact things have on your heart and mind.

And in the midst of hanging on to perspective, you also have to handle how other people deal, too. With their need to help and understand and reach out to you, and also with their ignorance, their cruelty, their insensitivity and arrogance when they think they know something. They think they get it, they say A-HA… and they couldn’t be more wrong.

I want to scream back how much those assumptions hurt, how they wound, how they make me ill in the pit of my stomach, but what’s the point?

People want to believe that they know something. And they don’t want to listen when you tell them they don’t, because that means they’d have to apologize or see you differently — or properly, as the case may be.

And seeing YOU isn’t what they wanted to do in the first place, anyway. They were just trying to see themselves.

Like Uncle Karl and Aunt Betty in bermuda shorts, superimposed on toddlers covered in bubbles. Picture on picture. But turn the lights on and right those slides, buddy.

This pain is mine.

This joy is mine.

This life is mine.

You could ask before you assumed.

If you did ask, you would know: it hurts more late at night than it does in the mornings. I think about it less during the day. The hurt sneaks up on me when I laugh sometimes, and that’s the most shocking thing. I forget about it and then I remember. I don’t know how to explain it. I don’t want to overstate it.

And when you said, “At least you’re not dying. You’re not really sick,” all I wanted to do was yell

Since when is dying the only pain that matters?

But I understood what you were trying to say, so I didn’t. I know how it feels to get the words wrong.

I do it every single day.

Because it’s hard to write about grief or sadness without sounding like your whole world is falling apart.

And mine?

Isn’t.