I May Not Know Who I Am, But I Know What I Want

Shannon’s story is featured in our March 2025 magazine issue. Click here to read “My Identity After Cancer.”

In popular lore, there is the cliche that before you die, your life flashes before your eyes. When I was 24, I was told I had stage III cancer, and what flashed before my eyes was all the life I should have lived: the wedding I would never have, the kids I would never raise, the dreams I was working toward—everything I thought I had time for could vanish in an instant.

I am not grateful for my cancer: it did not make me stronger, and I did not gain more compassion or empathy from it. However, almost losing my life at such a young age illuminated all that I have left to do. There is a fire beneath me hotter than the flames of hell; God help anyone who stands in my way. It is this fire that carries me, and although I know now more than ever what I want in life, I could not begin to tell you who I am.

For some, their twenties are for finding themselves and taking the steps to become the person they want to be. I lost two years of building my life’s foundation to COVID-19 and one to cancer. All my friends and those around me have evolved and grown, and here I am stunted. While my peers get married, have babies, and buy houses, I have organs removed, go to doctors’ appointments, and wonder if I will live long enough to watch my nephews grow.

All the steps I took to create my own life crumbled beneath my feet when I was diagnosed. I lost my body, my home, my job, my independence, and most importantly, my confidence. In losing these facets of my life that I had worked so hard for, I lost pieces of myself. Each of these losses acted as an attack on my identity, obliterating pillars of myself one by one. I became a zombie, a walking visage, a shadow of who I used to be. In the war for my survival, the first casualty was my spark. While I did not lose it entirely, it dimmed and became a pilot light.

When I was undergoing treatment, I developed a new sense of normalcy that was formed by the routine I had. With the constant merry-go-round of scans, different providers, various appointments, and changing treatment plans, before I knew it, there was a new me. At times, I found cancer to be an out-of-body experience. As an able-bodied person diagnosed with cancer at a young age, I felt a vague sense of betrayal from my body. I had spent so many years learning to be compassionate for my body, and this is how it repays me? From that first moment of betrayal, I started disassociating from my physical form. I tried to go as far away from the pain as I could, and in doing so, I let go of the physical ties I had to myself. I cannot even recognize my body anymore. The cognitive dissonance I feel when I look in the mirror gives me whiplash. Throughout my treatment, I acquired a hidden disability. My body became a galaxy painted with constellations of scars, and I lost fourteen percent of my body weight, most of my hair, and several organs. I never realized how much of my identity was tied to my physical form until I lost so much of it.

For the longest time, I fought to return to my sense of normality, to return to my old life. I did not realize that my life, the sense of normalcy I had grown accustomed to, and the person I used to be were all gone—and that I would never get them back. Sometimes, I wish someone had told me I would never return to them, but then, what would I have been fighting for? In the most challenging times, I said to myself, “The faster you get through this, the faster you can get back to normal.” Now that it is all over, I have found it hard to reconcile that that is not an option for me. It is difficult to remember who I was before all of this, yet I still find myself slipping into old patterns that I had told myself I would break if I survived. How am I so estranged from who I was before and yet so readily making the same mistakes? It has been hard not to glorify my life before; I must remember that it is OK to leave some things in the past. How do I grieve who I once was when I do not know who I am now? How do I move forward and seek closure? It is human nature to adapt to survive. Was the cost of my survival my identity? I had to sacrifice both physical and metaphorical parts of myself to survive. I feel fractured by that.

Survivorship for me had to start with reintroducing me to myself. Now that I stand on the precipice of creating my new normal, I am terrified. I do not know where to start. I feel disoriented and lost, I do not know how to rebuild. I became so preoccupied with surviving that I forgot my true passions. Now that I am still here, all I can think is “Now what?” I went from having my life all planned out to just surviving day by day. It has been hard shifting my mindset back to having a future. There is no road map for survivorship; it is something I have learned I must navigate on my own, but I am beginning to learn how to form my new identity.

I never thought the question, “What makes you happy?” would elicit such an exasperated and confused response from me. With the blinders of survival on, I learned to put my happiness on the back burner. When I did that, my own joy became foreign to me. Even though I told myself that my happiness was what I was fighting for, I became so disconnected from the process of creating it that when it came time to resume my life, I did not know how to start.

While I may not know who I am, I know what I do not want in life and what I will not tolerate. I have a newfound passion for the boundaries that I have redrawn and solidified. My priorities are stronger than ever, I know what I fought for, and I will not settle for anything less. Rebuilding a life is hard; there is a fine balance between what is needed of you and what you need. When you are fighting for your life, things become black and white—there is simplicity in survival. Reentering life as a survivor is learning how to live in color again.

Trying to find my way forward, I am fueled by the fire of a life incomplete and steered by the reminders in my head: “This is what I fought for.” Perhaps, on my journey to finishing what I started, I will find myself along the way.