Surviving the Life You're Given

On being told I could make a fortune — and why I won't Written and read by Nicole Cody

“People may think you’re giving up, when in fact you are simply giving in to the reality of your new life.”
— Toni Bernhard, How to Be Sick

Hello, Friends.

I met a girlfriend for coffee yesterday.

She’s an entrepreneur. Years ago, that’s how we met — sitting together in a business course, dreaming up what we might build.

I was telling her I’d moved my writing to Substack when she started firing ideas at me.

“You should create paid tiers about manifestation,” she said. “Teach people how to visualise their dream life. How to heal from anything. How to create whatever they want. You’ve got so much credibility. You’d make a fortune.”

I smiled.

My friend is always about the money. Always. And she has never quite been able to understand my position, which is that money matters, but it isn’t everything — and I won’t sell my soul to make a few fast bucks.

So, I smiled. Because she’s probably right. Which is exactly why I can’t.

The older I get, the less interested I am in teaching people how to escape being human.

Which is why I want to tell you about the space I live in. It isn’t a strange space, though our society treats it as though it were — something to be hidden, or apologised for, or discretely fixed. It’s the space so many of us actually inhabit, and are encouraged to pretend we don’t. I’m going to speak from inside it, and for the people who are in here with me.

I’m almost sixty. Since the age of fourteen, I have been trying to hide from illness, to cure it, or pivot around it. I have genetic and degenerative conditions, and late-stage infections. I have spent more than forty years trying to get better and striving to get my old life back — both the life that was promised to me, and that I thought I would be living, and the life I’ve had glimpses of when I was more well.

For forty years I’ve had able-bodied people telling me that all I need to do is follow their protocol. All I need to do is visualise my better outcome. All I need to do is use my powers of manifestation. All I need to do is trust and proclaim and affirm and ask the universe and know that I shall receive it. And if it isn’t working, then I’m either not trying hard enough, or I’m failing as either a patient or a mystic.

Honestly. Fuck that.

I almost always smile when people share these thoughts with me. I’m sure they mean well. But my exhaustion with this kind of advice is overwhelming, and so is the frustration of being met by people who have no idea what it is to live inside a chronic, degenerative, or terminal illness. And these days I no longer have the bandwidth to explain it to them.

Here is the thing they don’t understand about the words they’re using. Especially the word ‘manifest’.

I know something about manifesting a dream life that the able-bodied will never know. I manifest my dream life because I cannot live my real life. I lie in bed, or sit in a chair, and I imagine the things I could be doing, the things I could have done. It’s living vicariously through my own imagination for all the things I will never get to do — the life I was promised, the life that everyone else has.

That’s what the word manifest means, in here.

I’m a lifelong meditator. I’ve journaled since I was eleven. I pull cards. I do all the things — except when I don’t. There have been times I’ve been too sick, too exhausted, and honestly too depressed to do any of the things that might have helped. Days I couldn’t meditate. Days I could barely lift my head off the pillow. Days I couldn’t pull together a single cohesive thought. And when you’re in that place, and someone tells you to be a warrior and fight, or to visualise and affirm, they don’t have a clue how hard it can be just to keep breathing. Just to keep going.

But there is something I have found, especially through chronic pain. Even when I don’t have the energy for anything else, I can go beneath the pain, and find a quiet, calm space inside myself, and sit there. There’s a peace in that place. And it’s enough.

In fact, getting to the point where I can no longer do anything, or try anything, is often what has led me to my most profound insights — my real breakthroughs. Not breakthroughs that lead to a cure. Breakthroughs that help me accept myself and my situation with more honesty and grace. Breakthroughs that let me see life from a new angle. And that kind of awareness comes slowly. Ever so slowly.

But the price of finding it is high. Because being in that quiet place is the only thing I can do — and meanwhile, life is passing me by.

I have become very good at being a mystic, because it was the only path left to me. When you’re bedbound, or housebound, your choices are limited. That path has grounded me in reality and given me magic at the same time, because I’ve had the time to devote to it. It has shown me a doorway into a smaller life, and how to find comfort and meaning once I walked through.

None of which I would have chosen.

All of which is my reality.

I have an enormous amount of compassion for the people who tell me and others that we only need to work harder, or believe harder. Because life comes for all of us. That might sound a harsh thing to say, but I have known people who have not yet been touched by illness, hardship, loss, grief or tragedy. What I have never known is anyone who got all the way through a life untouched by any of them.

The people asking me to reach for the cure, to affirm harder, to manifest a better reality — they haven’t been burnt by the fire yet. And we’re all sold the same idea: that life is meant to be about striving, about productivity, about pushing back against age, about hiding what’s wrong with us, about a cure for everything.

Life has shown me that this simply isn’t true.

I hope those people never have to visit my corner of the world. But if they do, I have a comfy chair here for them.

There have been days when it was tempting to go down the guru path myself. To sell my soul for those fast bucks. But there’s a good reason I never will.

I have been the person who bought the snake oil. I have tried everything. I have spent so much money, so much time, so much energy chasing a cure, chasing a different life to the one I have. And in the end it never amounted to anything — no matter how good I was, no matter how faithfully I stuck to the program.

So I can’t do that to someone else. I can’t let a person be promised something untrue, and then have to watch them carry the crushing defeat of not being able to make the cure happen. There’s a cruelty in that I will not inflict on anyone. I won’t do it. I can’t do it.

What I share instead is what I know to be true. That you can live within a smaller life, or a life filled with loss and grief, and still find meaning. You can find yourself, and know yourself. You can connect to your inner wisdom, and to the world and the universe around you, as a mystic.

If I am running out of time, or capacity, or function — then I had better stop chasing cures and berating myself when they don’t come, and do the work of being present in my one precious life. Because that’s where the magic and the meaning are.

Even as everything is breaking down and falling apart.

All my love,

Nicole xx