Acceptance Vs. Understanding

Learning to love people better

Shefali O'Hara
3 min readFeb 21, 2024
Photo by Joel Muniz on Unsplash

The other day I had a friend over for a visit.

I had explained to her before she came over that, thanks to cancer and an early morning visit to Texas Oncology followed by session with my physical therapist, I was low energy.

She still acted hurt when I told she’d have to leave after about an hour.

I understood.

After all, she’s only 23 years old.

Adolescents have always been self-centered. I know I was when I was in my teens. These days, people often act like that into their late 20s/early 30s.

However, later in the conversation I was a bit more outspoken with her.

She was talking about her plans for the coming week.

One reason I’d agreed to see her that day even though I was busy and knew I’d be tired — because she would be out of town from Wednesday morning until Sunday night and she sent me a text saying she really missed me. I hadn’t seen her in several months, and if I do chemo I probably won’t want to see anyone for a while.

So I asked her over and while we chatted she shared her upcoming plans.

She was really excited — one of her college friends was now a working model and she was…

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Shefali O'Hara

Cancer survivor, writer, engineer. BSEE from MIT, MSEE, and MA in history. Love nature, animals, books, art, and interesting discussions.