The Give and Take of Cancer

Come and hear Kelsie read her story at our upcoming Perkatory event on November 13th!

Cancer is greedy, in the most ravenous and insatiable way. It has taken my energy, my routines, my sense of stability, and any sense of predictability I ever thought I had. I can’t unknown this level of mortality now. It sits in every room with me, whether I’m at chemo or at game night with friends.

It took practically all control. Richard and I didn’t get to linger in that sweet spot of engagement. We had to rush to the county clerk’s office on a random Wednesday because his insurance was better than mine and the specialist I needed didn’t accept mine. The wedding will still be beautiful, but the timeline wasn’t ours anymore.

It has chipped away at my identity. Before this diagnosis, I had just started really appreciating and falling in love with my body. I was fueling it well, pushing it at the gym, searching for new hiking trails, and really feeling capable and strong. I watched cancer treatments slowly tear down everything I had built. Steroids made me blow up like a balloon and stretch marks carved themselves into my skin. Chemo thinned my hair and altered my taste buds. Before I knew it, my body didn’t feel like mine, and when I looked in the mirror I didn’t recognize myself.

I don’t want to give cancer any credit, but it has also given me new opportunities, if I’m open to seeing them. Things like perspective shifts and brutal clarity. And most importantly, the opportunity to evolve into a stronger individual while simultaneously grieving as the life I once pictured slowly dissolves.

People say that something like a cancer diagnosis gives you clarity on what *really* matters in life, as if your priorities in life before were somehow wrong. I don’t think that’s true. I think that there is before cancer and after cancer, and you have to decide what is worth taking up space on each end. Time, energy, and attention don’t have infinite space. I used to fill them with things that made sense in that season. Before cancer, I liked a seamlessly clean kitchen. But right now I don’t have the time or space for that, and I don’t look back and say, “Wow, I shouldn’t have prioritized that. It doesn’t matter if there are dishes in the sink.” Because in that season of life, I had the space and capacity for it, and it did matter to me. It made me feel accomplished. Now I don’t have the capacity or space to keep a seamlessly clean kitchen, and I’ve accepted that and recalibrated. It mattered and I had the capacity for it in one season, and yet in the next season it didn’t matter and I didn’t have the capacity for it.

Cancer has also given me the opportunity to have a bolder, more unapologetic voice. When I write, when I post on TikTok, when I share in my private Facebook support group, I speak plainly. Cancer cracked something open in me that made me less afraid to be seen.

It’s given me the opportunity to use creativity as a survival tool. Crafting, writing, recording videos all connect me to others who “get it,” or at least want to. They give me ways to process what’s happening without letting it consume me.

And maybe the strangest gift: the ability to live in contradiction. To hold grief and joy in the same breath. To laugh with the nurses on the infusion floor while my body fills with poison.

One of the clearest lessons has been about people. Cancer makes some vanish. They don’t know what to say, or they’re uncomfortable, so they slip away. That stings. But others show up with a force that I didn’t know was possible.

My therapist once told me that sometimes what looks like anger is really grief. Not grief in the sense of a funeral, but grief for the life you thought you’d have. Cancer forces you to peel back layers like an onion, whether you want to or not. You grieve freedom, you grieve ease, you grieve the version of yourself who didn’t live with a invisible countdown clock ticking somewhere ominously in the background. And you notice other people still walking around with their outer onion layers intact, not forced to peel. Sometimes that is infuriating. But other times it’s a reminder that a certain level of empathy often comes only when life rips those layers away. It also gives you grace (and a little bit of jealousy, if I’m completely honest) for those people you see still walking around, with all their onion layers intact, recognizing that they can’t possibly understand what you’re going through.

All of that to say, cancer doesn’t only take, it rewrites. It rewrote how I speak, how I love, how I weigh what’s worth my time. It rewrote my marriage timeline, my relationship with my body, and is still rewriting my identity. It also rewrote my creativity, my voice, my perspective. It may hold the pen, but I am the editor. And I find my strength in that.

I wouldn’t have chosen this. I’d hand back the “gifts” and opportunities in a heartbeat and take back all those onion layers. But that’s not an option. That’s the give and take of cancer: it takes pieces I’ll grieve forever, and it gives me pieces that make me unrecognizable to my former self. Some days I mourn that unrecognizable version. Other days, I thank her for surviving long enough to get me here.

I used to think cancer was a detour, a terrible stretch of road I just had to survive until I could merge back onto the highway of “normal life.” But that illusion has shattered. Even if my scans magically cleared tomorrow, I can’t go back to who I was before cancer. I’m floating in this strange middle ground. I’m not who I was, and yet still not who I will become. I grieve the version of me that’s gone while trying to understand the version that’s forming, thanking her for surviving long enough to get me here.

I’ve learned to keep showing up, even when my body won’t. I bend, I pivot, I adapt. Sometimes I crash, but I don’t disappear, no matter how much cancer tries to give and take.