The Death of Relatability

Cancer steals a lot from you. Your time, your health, your freedom, sometimes even your life. The day that you’re diagnosed, doors that remain open for many other people slam shut in your face. And other doors—unwanted at best—open and beg to be entered. It doesn’t matter if you’re only 21 years old and brimming with the will to live, feet barely crossing the line into adulthood before you’re signing an advanced directive. You don’t know what any of it means, but you’ve been told it’s “Important for people in your position.”

Standing in the shadows of your diagnosis are crowds of people who cower when they hear the dreaded “C” word. To the everyday person, cancer is a monster that needs to be slaughtered with a big, revolutionary cure. Most of them don’t understand that in reality, we need a thousand different cures, each curated in a different way. And often, a cancer diagnosis highlights the differences between you and the everyday person who remains blissfully ignorant, but well-intended, nonetheless.

As a young adult cancer patient especially, your perspective is violently uprooted, shaken around like a gift shop snow globe, and gingerly placed back down to settle into a new and unfamiliar place. With every appointment to check for recurrence, with every missed IV placement, and every minute spent choking down oral contrast, your peers become less relatable. Or, more specifically, you become less relatable to your peers. Going through cancer as a young adult means scrolling through Instagram from the chemo chair and watching your friends hang out for the third day in a row. You sit face-to-face with your mortality at every turn; you learn about palliative care and stay up until 3:00 a.m. reading research papers about the life expectancy of others with your diagnosis before realizing it was published in 1997.

Inevitably, a monster as big as cancer will scare off a few folks. Some can’t or aren’t willing to show up for you. They have friends that are easier to talk to, who are more reliable, less depressing, and more able-bodied. Friends that don’t make them think about their own mortality. You can no longer be an empathetic, listening ear to their troubled love lives, nor their daily complaints about what now feels like the most infuriatingly minuscule issue to exist. At times, you wonder if they even hear themselves, but then you subsequently feel guilty for your frustration. You remind yourself that it’s not their fault your perspectives are wildly different. It’s not their fault, but it’s now your burden to carry. People turn into walking reminders of the life that you once had; the same life that you lost. It’s difficult to be around them due to no fault of their own. You remind yourself to be compassionate. Maybe today’s traffic is the worst thing they’ve ever encountered. And damnit, you still wish they could hear themselves!

Sometimes, illuminating the shadows of your diagnosis like a light in the night is also the occasional friend who meets you where you’re at. They’re the ones who react to you canceling plans for the second time in a row with kindness and understanding. They make you feel held in the person you never wanted to be, but the person cancer made you become. Sometimes, you find this in someone who used to be a stranger prediagnosis, while simultaneously watching those who used to be close to you become strangers over time. You’re forced to value your energy more, and whether it’s within the cancer community or out of it, you find people who share the same sentiment. Your time is now limited, in one way or another. To me, the act of showing up looks much different now; it means lending a listening ear to my weekly spirals about mortality, even if you have nothing useful to say. It means making plans with me for a third time, even though you don’t expect anything to come of it. It means understanding what I have to give, and not wanting anything more.

In a sort of sad irony, cancer has a way of making you grieve a life you’re still living. It makes you grieve a thousand little deaths before your own, most of them in places you never expected. Starting the day you’re diagnosed, you grieve. You grieve your eyebrows. You grieve your ability to climb a flight of stairs without being out of breath afterwards. For some of us, we grieve the time we spent misdiagnosed and unheard. You even grieve how disproportionately significant the insignificant things used to feel. And ultimately, after sickness has weeded out those unfit to remain in your life, your friendships may have dwindled, but the connections that remain are so much deeper; so much more impactful than you could’ve ever imagined.

At times, a cancer diagnosis seems to bar you from living a normal life, and the pity you feel from your non-sick peers even further isolates you from feeling like a normal person. You’re forced to think about dying 30-something years sooner than the rest of the people around you, and it puts you in a unique position that only other seriously ill people can relate to. The average person has a pretty standard timeline—school, career, maybe family, and then retirement. But trying to reorient around a major illness is difficult: do you prioritize your career? Do you travel and check everything off your bucket list, but risk losing a stable future? Do you even have a future? Planning a life around a disease so unpredictable is a burden most of your peers don’t share, but eventually—through community—you find a way to fill that gaping hole of relatability.

As a young adult facing a cancer diagnosis, you step through a door to find a room full of thousands of people just as scared and unsure as you are. You begin to find comfort in your new community, getting to know a few people just to learn that aside from the cancer, you have a ton in common. It’s not a rare occurrence, almost every cancer patient I’ve met has eventually sought out community and stumbled upon at least one, if not multiple people that they’ve truly connected with. But the misfortune about making other friends with cancer is that ultimately, it’s a double-edged sword in which one side is the beauty of relatability, and the other side is a jutting reminder that your bodies really want to kill you. The issue, or the allure—depending on how you look at it—of making friends with other people with cancer is that you both have cancer. And cancer does what cancer will; it steals indiscriminately and leaves no apologies in its wake. It is a stubborn, unpredictable beast. It will show you a friend and then take their life in the same breath. It’s cruel, it’s senseless, but you knew it was a possibility going in, and you still chose to proceed.

It’s painful, retraumatizing even, but you don’t back away because every scan day, every recurrence scare, and every follicle of hair that falls out of your head is a reminder that you aren’t doing it alone. You won’t be the first one, and you certainly won’t be the last.

Cancer threatens your life, but day by day, you learn to take it back in the ways you can. And though it may steal a lot from you, at the very least, it grants you a lifetime membership to the world’s shittiest club.

And really, what more could you ask for?

This article was featured in the December 2023 Rediscovering Yourself After Cancer issue of Elephants and Tea Magazine! Click here to read our magazine issues.