"Testing, testing? Is this thing on?" came a friendly voice from behind the stage mic.

I looked across the table to view my fellow podcast host fumbling around with the cables. His round glasses slipping down his nose as he reaches for the XLR cable at the foot of the desk.

"Ahh, gotcha"

"There we go! Can you hear me now?"

Snickering, with a shit-eating smile creeping across my face I sit opposite him awaiting his reaction. My foot now off the cable that otherwise pinned it to the floor.

"What's so funny?" he asks.

I'll tell you shortly, I reply, getting up to help him with the last of the set up process on the mixing desk. Today we have decided to take a deep dive into what makes the human psyche so phenomenal, and why maintaining a positive frame of mind can be so powerful.

Now looking directly at me with a faint grimace, he taps violently on the microphone a couple more times and repeats "IS IT ON?"

Giggling and breaking into laughter I respond, "Yes! For the love of God, it's on."

Jumping right in to the podcast we start off by discussing the weather, our days and how we ended up in this particular instance, why the podcast exists and what we wanted to express to other people. The general consensus is to be a point of education, to bring to light some of the most difficult topics and to show people that by dragging the demons into the light, we can face them and start the process of dealing with deeper-rooted anxieties.

The topic of today's podcast is "sanity", or lack thereof after physical and emotional trauma.

Carefully guiding the conversation, he introduces the topic and asks, "I want you to explain this to me, given everything you have been through, how have you retained your sanity?"

Taking in a deep breath, I let out a sigh, pause and begin.

Could I retain my sanity during times of extreme emotional, mental and physical trauma… The short answer? The majority of my sanity went out the window on day one. More specifically in hour one. Hearing you have been diagnosed with cancer instantaneously breaks the connection you have with your body. Everything becomes a blur and nothing is real anymore. Even when you are told you are on a cure path and presented with the steps you have to take to achieve that, your mind still wonders whether there is actually any point left in living.

The chemicals are designed to kill. It's injected into your veins with one purpose, kill whatever is killing you. And since modern medicine isn't yet advanced enough where it can differentiate between the good and the bad cells… it just, kills, everything. You know what's the most alarming thought? Sitting in the hospital ward after you have had the surgery to remove the wretched tumours only to realise that the chemicals currently coursing through your veins is just killing YOU.

I remember being so horrified at that thought alone that in that instance I wanted to rip the tube out of my arm and run down the ward toward the door. What would I do when I got there? Who the fuck knows. Probably fall off into the pit of darkness at the edge of the cliff of my mind, because much like a lot of these thoughts, there was no end point. It was a fleeting thought of 'what if' and 'surely it can't be worse than this'.

What if I ran out of here, ass hanging out the back of the hospital robe and a line of tubes trailing behind me? What are they honestly going to do? Drag me back to the dorm? Call security?

Actually probably something like that, but in a complete and utter blind state of panic, your mind doesn't stop to consider any of these factors. Just that you will be free from the chemicals for all but a moment.

The latter part of that realisation pattern is the important one, 'it cannot be worse than this.' It's as if rock bottom has been defined for the rest of your life and when things start to go a wee-bit haywire, say forgetting your keys, or a brief financial rut, or something common and trivial, then it's no longer an 'oh shit!' moment, but rather an 'oh, this is exciting!' moment.

Let me break this down for you further. I'll make the grand assumption that you, the reader are familiar with the British-American author and idealist, Simon Sinek? If not, you can go look him up, but in a speech of his back in 2018 he made the staggering comparison between recognising the physiological traits of nervousness and excitement. That on a fundamental level, the feeling is the same, only the mental reaction is different.

Let me paraphrase his example. You're in an aeroplane returning home from holiday and the pilot is late to announce that you will be flying through a rough turbulent patch. Your immediate reaction is to grab your seat and brace yourself. The typical traits of an 'oh shit reaction'. Your heart races, you're visualising the future and your hands are sweating. Now consider a moment of genuine excitement, say perhaps you won an award: racing heart, visualisation, sweaty hands. The exact same experience. What he concludes is that we can train ourselves to interpret nervousness as excitement.

And this is precisely what I did, with one key difference, everything became exciting. Nothing can even come close to being as bad as nearly dying in the post-anaesthetic care unit as doctors and nurses struggle to feed my body with enough coagulants to stabilise me. It can't get much worse than hearing after four gruelling cycles of chemo that I needed an additional two. That one surgery wasn't enough, that they have to operate again. That I had no immune system and had been diagnosed with a global-pandemic disease and needed to be put in the isolation ward.

Is this a joke? It sure as shit sounds like one.

Over the course of my treatment and recovery I have basically done it all. From embarrassing to downright terrifying. Vomiting on myself, to having someone else wash me, peeing in a bottle or through a tube. Eating nothing but fluids and the stained taste of blood at the back of my throat. Everyone has seen me and I have bore witness to my body going through each of these experiences with front-row seats. You think seeing it from over there looks hard? Try it from the first-person perspective without the connection to the vessel experiencing it. That comes later. The processing of the terror, the embarrassment and the general understanding takes months if not years to work through.

I have often spoken about the emotional disconnect between the body and mind. The chemical-searing of what I once knew, much like a wild fire burns away everything the forest or savannah once was. Over the course of years, short spouts of green shoots through the burnt and cracked earth to show that indeed, life does continue on. This is what recovery feels like.

Learning to feel again through my extremities, rebuilding my gut bacteria, regrowing nose hairs, learning to walk and my body refuelling platelet and red-blood counts, I'm no longer bleeding, dying or out for display. Instead I am growing, developing, learning and yet struggling with the idea of reintegrating.

I feel different, vulnerable and exposed. My story is well known and I choose for it to be that way. With that said, however, it still means that nobody else will understand what it was like. Sure, some people come close, particularly if they won the horror lottery and lived through treatment too. But for the lay-person, the new friend or interaction of mine, I feel I don't belong. My life has been on hard mode and the boss fights have done nothing but beat me to a pulp and left me to die on the ground for months on end. If not for my support network and loved ones, I would have ceased to exist.

To combat the devastating periods, the mind lets go of sanity and turns everything into a joke. And I mean everything. It's all funny. Stubbing your toe? Lost relationship? Keys? Burnt rice? Financial ruin? I sit and laugh my way through it all, because at the end of the day despite how much I may have had to grind to get into bed that evening, it was still in no way, shape or form, anywhere as challenging as one hour on chemotherapy, where you wonder every second that passes whether or not your body will have the ability to fight and live through it all.

On days that are still tough, you bet I find ways to laugh at myself. No point in getting upset that I forgot to buy milk or that I burnt my dinner three nights in a row, who the fuck cares. That shit is hilarious.

"That's some rotten luck mate, your rice, burnt? Were you not paying attention?"

Frankly, not, I must have forgotten what I was doing. Or a momentary lapse of reason, which surprisingly happens so frequently, that the most entertaining time is losing train of thought midway through an important conversation.

But you know what plaster solves all these innocuous issues? Laughter.

Haha, I forgot where we were. Haha can you imagine this scenario? Haha, can you believe I burnt my rice again. Haha, haha, haha. And so on. The mind starts to adjust, and slowly but surely you become the epitome of the Joker. A dark and twisted humour wraps itself around you and doesn't let go. But you know what, there's nothing a good chuckle won't shake off.

The funniest thing is how many people you can fool with this technique. Almost everyone. You can hide in plain sight and nobody would suspect a fucking thing. "He's just a bubbly guy", or "He doesn't take life too seriously." The jury might be out on a lot of those, but the secret here is that laughter is just a coping mechanism, employed by a desperate mind that wants nothing more than to save what little sanity it might have left. To hold onto some form of regularity and familiarity. The rest can be clumped up under the umbrella reaction 'laughter'.

There is one small issue, though. Not everyone is fooled. And it's the emotionally-intelligent individuals that see right through this charade and then treat you with the love and respect you require. Not want, but need.

I was once, asked, "You laugh a lot, what percentage of your laughter reactions are genuine?" It took me a moment to realise what I had been asked. As if the curtain had been slashed open to expose my naughty and dark secret to the overwhelming hot and bright sunshine for the world to see. How dare they expose my coping strategies. How dare they remind me that I am using laughter as a vice to cover-up the disturbing and unbelievably overwhelming pain and misery I experience. What am I to do now?

In that particular interaction, I remember telling them that maybe 40% of all my laughter was genuine. The other 60% was a mask that I threw on to hide the agony that I have to deal with on a daily basis. You know why though? Because the majority of people who ask "how are you?" don't care. They don't give a damn about whether you are okay. Rather, the notion of laughing and replying with an upbeat answer, is a lot quicker at moving the conversation along than trying to trudge your way through the horror parts for constant processing.

There have certainly also been times when I have caught myself in a dark spiral and felt like if I were to really show the disturbed nature of my laughter, it could look something like Heath Ledger's Joker. Maniacal, and seemingly without reason. The Joker uses any and everything as an excuse for a laugh. If I had ever stooped down to that level, it would have been a sign that I was at risk of losing the final drop of sanity I had left.

After all, I could very much imitate the famous line, "Do you wanna know how I got these scars?" Spoken calmly through a sinister smile, only instead of facial cuts, I could show you six major scars that have made a permanent fixture on my body. If anything, I'm going to make a grand appearance for the next Halloween party, that's for sure!

Now, you might point out that masking and hiding through laughter is a crutch or vice, that detracts from actual and necessary processing, but I would like to remind you that a lot of that is done behind the scenes.

Through meditation or sitting down to relax with no company, distraction or external stimulation. The time spent doing nothing, alone, is where the mask comes off and the processing continues. In addition, I would advocate that a large part of radiant happiness comes from the 'fake-it till you make-it', or 'just-pretend' feelings. Invariably if you are around happy and radiant people, engaging in happy and radiant interactions, you will, at some stage, elicit real happy and radiant emotions.

And so with that in mind, I choose to retain my laughing coping strategy to deal with the emotions of my own tragedies. The fun and upbeat smile that brightens the darkest corners of my mind will allow me time to rebuild, recover and eventually lead myself to a happier and more joyous existence.

I don't think I will ever forget or truly be free of the horrors. But balancing the deep, dark and terrifying, with the bright, beautiful and enlightening sounds like a good way to instil emotional stability.

Want to engage with more of my work? Come find me and my narrations (freely) on my Remaining Mark Substack: