First off, I really dislike the armchair psychologist way cancer + mental health is commonly framed: “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” or “You needed [traumatic life event] to become who you are today.”, etc.
I don’t think those phrases help you deal with the day to day reality of what makes cancer challenging. They encourage a goose chase for meaning in something that is just arbitrary and shitty. People aren’t “given” cancer as an emotional test. Sometimes things just suck. That could be interpreted as hollow, but it’s comforting to me. I’m allowed to be angry and I’m not obligated to ascribe cosmic significance to getting healthy. ALL THAT BEING SAID, I have indeed learned some significant emotional lessons in the last month.
A little bit of context on my emotional starting point before treatment:
My default M.O. is built around independence, self-reliance, and generally working overtime to not make my emotions other people’s problem. I’ll spare the full psychoanalysis on why, but it’s good split of innate nature, learned behavior, and general Midwest nice ethos. Thank you therapy for my continued progress on loosening this death grip.
I derive most of my self-worth from competence and productivity. I’m not a workaholic, this value can come from a variety places, but in general, I get fueled by the affirmations of perceived success/tangible outcomes and I can get really stuck by the guilt that I’m not contributing, working hard enough, or not solving problems.
… <insert cancer>… 💣
Overnight, I had no choice but to hard stop operating that way. I was gonna have to accept help, lots of it, and cope with my limited bandwidth at my new job. I had started “training” for a transition like this in therapy, but it felt like being forced to run a marathon after only reaching 5K status.
It was easiest for me to start with accepting help from family. My parents were along for the diagnostic ride and they didn’t give a choice to deflect their help for managing treatment (in the best way possible). I’ve struggled with the guilt for everything they took on and gave up as a result. This was my Dad’s first year of retirement; they should have exclusively been breaking in that Florida lifestyle and making progress on their travel wishlist. Instead, they’ve took over 25 trips to Chicago (in the winter), helped me get back and forth to appointments, handled dry ice/logistics/application of cold caps, meal stocking, cleaning, the list continues.
With so many acts, large and small, I’ve had to work on verbally redirecting the number of times I say “thank you” and “I’m sorry”. After a certain volume, those phrases get super annoying, but I feel compulsive need to continually acknowledge my appreciation. I keep revisiting the question, “Would I feel burdened doing this for someone I love?” and the answer is always no. It should not have been shocking that people are really nice to people with cancer and genuinely want to be of service to me, but wow, they are.
Managing my inability to do my job well, especially since no one had worked with me pre-treatment, was really hard for me. Chemo brain fog felt like my brain kind of knew the answers to things, but it was saying it in pig latin. Ancay ouyay aysay hattay lowersay leasepay? So much of my job is about the ability to process things quickly, interview people about things I’m not an expert in, and be creative in gray spaces, so the inability to think nimbly hit me really hard. I couldn’t trust if my brain could get there, if I was going to say something dumb, and didn’t know how to estimate how long things would take me which made me constantly worried that my coworkers were resenting how they needed to pick up my slack. So I had this added guilt and insecurity while also loosing the self esteem boost I usually get from work. I don’t have a neat resolution of this set of anxieties, but I’m rebuilding that confidence and have now learned that the world did not burn down as a result of me being at a lower capacity and that actually my definition of “lower capacity” is perfectly fine for most things. Not every year has to be one of explosive career growth. It’s ok for my brain to have been a lil on auto-pilot and lean on the people around me. I’d do it for them. <3