The Part of Survivorship No One Prepared Me For

During cancer treatment, there was always a next step.

I was 38 when I was diagnosed with stage III breast cancer. What followed was more than a year of treatment—chemotherapy, a mastectomy and radiation—and a life increasingly organized around cancer. There was always somewhere I needed to be, something I needed to endure or another milestone I was trying to reach.

The next infusion. The next appointment.
The next scan. The next surgery. The next radiation session.

My calendar told me where to go, my medical team told me what came next, and much of my energy went toward one thing: getting through it.

When Treatment Ends, What Comes Next?

What I wasn't prepared for was what happened when there was suddenly nothing left on the calendar telling me how to heal.

Treatment ended, but I didn't simply return to the woman I had been before cancer.

I had survived something enormous. My body had changed. My relationship with it had changed. The way I understood safety had changed. My priorities were changing. Even things that had once felt certain about who I was and what I wanted no longer necessarily fit.

And yet there can be an expectation after cancer that once treatment ends, you should be ready to move on.

You're done.

You're okay.

Now go live your life.

I wanted to live my life. Desperately.

I just had to figure out what that life was now.

That, for me, has been one of the most complicated parts of survivorship.

Learning How to Heal After Cancer

Cancer treatment gave me protocols. Survivorship required me to develop a relationship with myself again.

I had to learn how to trust a body that had frightened me. I had to learn the difference between paying attention to my body and being afraid of every sensation in it. I had to make decisions about my health while understanding that there would never be a way to eliminate every possible risk.

I also had to grieve.

Not only what cancer physically took from me, but the version of myself who existed before I knew what it felt like to hear, "You have cancer."

For a while, I thought healing might mean getting her back.

Now, I don't think that's the goal.

I don't want cancer to define the rest of my life, but pretending it didn't change me would be another kind of dishonesty.

Cancer Changed Me, and That's OK

Some of those changes have been painful. Others have given me clarity.

I am more protective of my peace. I pay attention when something in my life consistently requires me to abandon myself. I ask different questions about success, relationships, work, my body and how I spend my time.

Most importantly, I have stopped waiting to become some perfectly healed version of myself before allowing myself to fully participate in my life.

There may always be something I am processing, rebuilding or learning to carry differently.

That doesn't mean my life is still on hold.

I can be grateful to be alive and still grieve what happened to me.

I can celebrate my body and have complicated feelings about how cancer changed it.

I can be strong and still have moments when survivorship feels heavy.

I can move forward without pretending I am moving backward toward the person I used to be.

Survivorship Isn't a Finish Line

I wish someone had told me that survivorship wouldn't necessarily feel like crossing a finish line.

For me, it has felt much more like learning how to live in a body and a life that are mine again.

There was no appointment for that.

No final treatment.

No moment when someone handed me a map and said, "This is how you become yourself again."

I have had to create that map as I go.

And maybe that is what I understand about survivorship now: the goal isn't to get back to who I was before cancer.

It is to honor her, honor what I survived, and give myself permission to discover who I am becoming after it.

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