Controlling The Response After Cancer

One day, many years ago, long before I had been diagnosed with cancer, I remember hearing some insight phrased in such a way that it struck a profound chord within me, and ultimately changed my perspective, and my life.

It was something like this: often in life, we resist the positive change within our reach, because sadness, or whatever shades of negative emotion it might be, has become FAMILIAR to us, like a part of our identity that feels too strange to part with. And there is something about the human mind that will prefer staying in an unhappy familiar to a potentially happy unknown.

We have likely heard this wisdom before packaged in so many different forms:

Change is uncomfortable.

Growth requires the courage to go outside your comfort zone.

A life with no setbacks means you’re not taking enough risks.

We can nod our heads at all of these. But sometimes, it is a particular wording that allows the idea to truly resonate. And so it was for me. It was in that particular moment that I realized I had been clinging to my unhappiness like a protective childhood blanket. That the idea of shedding it was, on some subconscious level, scarier to me than the continual feeling of its sad and somber embrace.

Often in life, we can recognize what we ought to do, or what we ought to focus on (the positive over the negative), but it is of course very hard, for so many different reasons, and it just doesn’t bear itself out in our reality. If we are very unlucky, we won’t even be aware enough to catch and mitigate the extra shame that can come from this discrepancy. And for many of us, we can give ourselves some grace–but we still live a life where we are at war with ourselves–constantly willing ourselves into gratitude, into acceptance, and biding our time with as much tolerance as can be mustered on the days that we feel bitter, and angry, and grief-stricken, and sad.

This is, of course, all okay. It is natural to feel these feelings after loss, after trauma, after disproportional despair–all things that can arrive with a cancer diagnosis, particularly so when one is still so young for it to feel so unfair. Because it is.

What many AYA survivors experience is a profound confusion upon entering survivorship after finishing treatment, even if reaching that promised land of “NED.” We should be grateful; we should be happy; we should make the most of our 2nd chance at life while we still can. We often do not realize: this is a lot of pressure. And on top of that, we are grieving: the physical parts of ourselves we have lost, the identity that we once had, and the future we’d envisioned for ourselves, or perhaps even took for granted. We are grieving the losses of things that were precious to us. And our whole bodies are grieving for the more smoothly, cohesively, and previously undisturbed system that it once was. We are adjusting, often struggling, to assimilate back into mainstream society when we have physical side effects and limitations. We are encountering expectations from friends, coworkers, and even family–expectations that often do not align with our physical or even emotional capabilities post-cancer.

Perhaps most of all, we find it frustrating and exhausting to go on living with chronic pain or discomfort and doctor’s appointments and scans, and medications to manage, and insurance coverage to navigate, and job demands to meet, and relationship stressors to withstand, and all of the other challenges of life that already make it so very, very hard, even for a completely healthy person–and we are expected to do all this on top of now having what is often a profoundly invisible (and a profoundly misunderstood) disability.

Getting cancer, going through cancer, the never-ending survivorship challenges with or after cancer–it makes us feel very powerless. And in many ways, we are. But I’m reminded now of another age-old wisdom.

Life is full of things over which we have no power or control. There is one thing, though, over which we always have some control. And that is: the way that we choose to respond.

It is not easy. Often, our responses are rooted in instinct–we are animals, after all. And the role and influence of our biology should never be underestimated or discounted. But, we are more than MERELY animals. We have the ability to think and behave in ways that no other animal can. We have the ability to make difficult, complex, or deeply considered choices. We have the ability to, perhaps only sometimes, overcome our animal instincts and our biological drivers. We have the ability to conform ourselves to a higher meaning or a higher purpose. For some, this feels god-given; for others, it is a meaning we can create or give to ourselves. Either way, it is a choice. We cannot always choose to make the adversity or hardship go away. But we can always choose the way that we respond to it.

It would be easier, more familiar–for me to wallow and bemoan my now much more difficult and tiring life. It would be easy for me to surrender to an existence that I deem less joyful, less worthy than I deserve. But I can choose. And it is not easy. But I can try. I can choose to focus on what I CAN control–I can choose to go forward and build the best life that I can, with all the pieces that I’ve still got left. And you can too. And it is not easy. But you can try.

I don’t always feel like I am succeeding. There are days and times that I feel bitter and discouraged, and I truly question the point of what seems like squeezing so hard for what feels like such little juice. But when I ask myself: what kind of person do I want to be? The answer comes back the same every time: one who responds to the struggle by trying my best, by choosing to focus on what I can control–on how I can make the most of what I’ve been given, and of what I’ve got left. And I’ve been given plenty, and I’ve got plenty left. And I promise you–you do too.