No One Talks About the Cocoon

Register for our upcoming Perkatory event to hear Frances read her piece aloud.

People talk about the butterfly because that is the part of transformation we can see. We see what emerges. We marvel at what survived. But we rarely think about what happened to the caterpillar while it disappeared from the world for a while.

That is what cancer treatment felt like to me.

While the world continued moving around me, I entered a kind of cocoon. It was not a place I chose to enter, and it was not a transformation I asked for. But for a time, it became the world I lived in.

And that is the part I remember most.

The world lived according to a calendar.

I lived according to cancer.

For everyone else, Monday was simply Monday.

For me, Mondays had become markers of treatment, and the days in between were measured by appointments, scans, surgeries, recovery, and the countdown to whatever came next.

People kept making plans. They talked about what they were doing next month, next summer, next year without a thought of the what ifs.

My children kept growing. Their lives kept unfolding in real time.

Meanwhile, much of my world had narrowed to the walls of my bedroom.

Before cancer, my bedroom was where I went to rest at the end of a long day, where I could close the door on everything happening outside of it. During treatment, rest became something different. My body was recovering from chemotherapy, surgery, nausea, and everything cancer treatment demanded of it. The world continued just beyond the door while I tried to gather enough strength for whatever came next.

As treatment continued, the changes became harder to ignore. Cancer was reshaping not only my days, but my body.

First, my hair.

Hair was simply the first visible sign that the woman who had entered cancer treatment was being altered by it.

Then came my breasts.

Bilateral mastectomy. Clinical language can make enormous things sound deceptively small. I had carried those breasts through womanhood and motherhood. Because survival demanded it, I allowed surgeons to remove them from my body.

Later came reconstruction, then the hysterectomy and removal of my ovaries. Piece by piece, the body I had inhabited for nearly forty years was changing in ways I could not undo.

There are moments in cancer when you look in the mirror and recognize your face but not necessarily the person looking back.

That is part of what people miss when they talk about surviving cancer. They imagine a person walking into treatment, fighting bravely, and eventually walking back out again, as though we simply emerge from treatment and return to who we were before.

But that is not what happened.

I changed inside that cocoon. We romanticize transformation because we usually meet it at the end. We see what emerges, but rarely what had to be lost, endured, or transformed in the dark before that moment.

There was nothing graceful about lying exhausted after chemotherapy. Nothing picturesque about drains hanging from my body after surgery. Nothing beautiful about mourning pieces of my body while simultaneously feeling grateful that removing them might help keep me alive.

How do you even begin to grieve something while feeling grateful for its loss? How do you look at scars and feel both sadness for what happened and relief that you are still here to see them?

Cancer asks us to hold emotions that should not logically fit together: grief and gratitude, fear and hope, anger and relief, strength and exhaustion.

It wasn’t that the people around me didn’t care. They did.

They could visit cancer.

I lived there.

They could leave the appointment, the infusion room, the hospital, and return to the rhythm of their own lives. I remained inside it — in the middle of the night when my thoughts would not quiet down, when I woke the next morning, whenever I tried to imagine the future.

Sometimes I would scroll through social media and watch people living ordinary days, and ordinary life suddenly seemed extraordinary. Someone complaining about work. Someone taking their kids to school. Someone talking casually about next year.

You can be genuinely happy for someone else and still ache for the life you had before cancer entered yours. You can love the people around you and still resent that they are able to step outside of something you cannot escape. You can feel grateful to be alive and still mourn everything survival has required from you.

Eventually, my hair grew. The surgeries healed. My body slowly became recognizable again, although never quite the same.

And people began saying the kinds of things people say when they believe the hardest part is over.

“You look amazing.”

“You’re so strong.”

“You made it.”

They meant those words with love. I know that. But sometimes those words reminded me how much of the experience had been invisible.

They couldn’t see the fear that could surface before a scan or how strange it felt to inhabit a reconstructed body. They couldn’t see the losses I was still trying to understand or the parts of my identity I was still trying to piece back together.

They couldn’t see that looking “normal” didn’t mean it was over.

For a long time, I thought healing meant trying to find my way back to her — the woman I was before cancer, before chemotherapy, before surgery, before scars. I thought if I healed enough, recovered enough, grew enough hair, I might eventually recognize her again.

But I no longer exist in the same way. Some parts of me returned. Some did not. And some were changed in ways I am still learning to understand.

Maybe that is what I wish people understood about transformation. Sometimes parts of you are lost and never come back. Sometimes you are not sure who you will be when you step outside of it.

When that first season of treatment ended, I emerged carrying a body, a life, and an understanding of time that were no longer the same.

I remember the versions of myself from that time: the woman beneath the blankets, the woman without hair, the woman recovering from surgery, the woman watching time move outside her window while her own life seemed suspended. I remember the infusion rooms, the hospital rooms, the car rides to appointments, and the days spent waiting for test results.

That was the cocoon.

Not one room. Not one moment. An entire season of my life when the world kept moving and I was changing inside something no one else could fully enter.

I was becoming.

Not into something more beautiful. Not into something better. Just into someone who had survived things the outside world might never fully see. Someone learning how to live in a body that had been changed. Someone learning how to exist in ordinary time again after living according to cancer. Someone learning that healing and returning are not necessarily the same thing.

Maybe we should spend less time admiring transformation from the outside and more time honoring what it takes to endure it.

Not the beauty of the butterfly.

The courage it takes to survive the cocoon.