Find Your Own Metaphors: Advice For Cancer Survivors

Felicia Mitchell is a survivor of stage 2b HER2-positive breast cancer diagnosed in 2010. Catch up on all of Felicia's blogs here!

Something that helped me during the healing year of my treatment for breast cancer was the way I framed the experience. I chose personal metaphors as I rejected common ones to stand up to cancer.

The other day, I saw a meme post on Facebook that we are supposed to copy and share in honor of a friend with cancer. It began, in all caps (shouting), “Please pray for me and my family as we deal with this difficult battle.” The post includes words like “difficult,” “have your back,” “fighting,” and another “battle.” Generic language just does not get at the uniqueness of each cancer journey.

Of course, I know that this word “journey” is not everybody’s word, and it is okay to reject “journey” if you need another metaphor. But as a college teacher who spent years explaining the journey motif to students, I found the word perfect for my circumstances. There are many ways to look at a journey. Sometimes it has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Other times, life itself is a journey. As the haiku poet Basho said, “The journey is home.” It was thus possible with cancer for me to feel an end was in sight even as I embraced the moment of each day.

In my journey, although I know heroes like Odysseus battled on their journeys home, I rejected the metaphor of the battle. I did not want to think I was fighting and struggling. I grew up with Martin Luther King, Jr., as a hero and have always been a fan of passive resistance. I guess I am a little strange, but when somebody beat me brutally on the schoolgrounds when I was a teenager often bullied, I did not fight back. I accepted what was happening and forgave the person beating me as I tried to understand where she was coming from. Nonviolent resistance helped me with cancer too.

If I did not embrace the battle metaphor, what did work? After all, cancer was not a piece of cake. I could say I had a hard, as my mother taught me to say, row to hoe. Coming from an agrarian culture, perhaps it was easier for me to embrace that metaphor of labor and its relatives. In fact, another agricultural metaphor that made chemotherapy easier was “controlled burn.” I grew up witnessing controlled burns, which is when fire is used carefully to make crops grow better or something like that. In addition, I love to imagine the wild hollyhock that will not germinate until a symbiotic fire is ignited by a lightning strike or ecological burn. Chemo burned, but I believed it would make me bloom.

If the metaphor of a controlled burn helped me get through chemo, a more “out there” metaphor helped with radiation, which itself is a sort of burn. With radiation, my challenge was to make peace with the noisy linear accelerator releasing beams of radiation to my chest. I also had to get used to being pinned down, something I have hated since the time of the incident mentioned earlier. With chemo, I cuddled in my chair with hot tea and blanket. With radiation, I cuddled up to the metaphor of a magic dragon breathing a gentle fire.

Overall, the therapeutic experience of cancer treatment felt more like a successful negotiation at a peace summit for me rather than a battle. “Battle” may, of course, be just the word you need to describe your cancer experience. Before you opt in, however, think about your unique personality and words that mean the most to you.

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