Finding Your Way Back to You

Who are you when you're not the girl with cancer anymore?

It's so common. Everyone knows someone that has had cancer, or is suffering with it themselves, and yeah it sucks, but nobody ever warns you that after the cancer is when shit gets weird.

It's supposed to be all sunshine and roses when you get cleared, but when the scars don't fade and your childhood memories consist almost entirely of hospitals, it's not the easiest thing in the world pretending it's all blessed. But by denying this part of my past, I've been doing myself a disservice. I'm a surviver, and that's nothing to be ashamed of.

Let's not be delusional, it doesn't end when you get cleared. Your hair doesn't grow back properly for a good few years, and when it does it's mad curly, like, imagine a bob entirely of tight curls and you occasionally get mistaken for a boy — it's not fun. Therapy would get more intense, because yet again, everything is changing. It's also really common to develop disorders after cancer treatment, which nobody gave me a heads up about, so when the OCD came in full swing it was a shock, but in retrospect makes complete sense. Best of all, the scars don't disappear; they may fade, but you can still see and feel them.

Going through this as a child and into adolescents stunts your personal growth, and only coming to terms with this at 20 only makes me annoyed for not being taught or even encouraged to come to terms with it sooner.

You would think being a surviver is something to be proud of, but when you're a teenager, you only see it as something that makes you different, almost contaminated. So I stopped telling people about it. When it was mentioned amongst family, I'd say I didn't want to talk about it and would quickly change the subject. Soon enough, it wasn't mentioned at all. I was allowed to brush it under the carpet and treat it like something to be embarrassed about, but if the scars from multiple operations don't want to disappear even after 10 years, then who the hell am I trying to kid? It's super damaging when you ignore a significant part of your medical history to the point where you do things, smoking for example, that's damaging to the average healthy person, but incredibly more dangerous for someone in remission. An obvious fact that I elected to ignore for a long time as a sincere 'fuck you' to the thing that once controlled my every action.

In order to grow and develop as a person, to try and figure out who you are, ~and this will most likely sound blatantly obvious,~ but you've got to be honest with yourself. If you're not, then every moment you think you're growing and maturing is actually a lie. It's no longer going to be an area of my past I ignore. I'm accepting that my childhood was ultimately very different from most peoples'. I'm embracing it. Starting with this written piece, I am embracing it.