A year out from my cancer diagnosis and a month out from my last scan, I still find myself trying to reconcile how I thought I would be feeling now with how I am. The following is excerpted from a journal I keep more or less sporadically:
The depression I was feeling a week or so ago now appears to have morphed into anxiety. It hits me when I arrive at work in the mornings–really, whenever I leave my daughter and husband. […] The news I follow (both local and national) every day is no help. I’m anxious about the rise of white supremacy, coronavirus, fires in Australia, the fact that the common flu killed an otherwise healthy thirty-five-year-old man… If I list them all here, will my worries go away?
I guess it’s part of post-cancer existence, this knowing in one’s bones–no longer just one’s head–that life is both fleeting and finite. Like those coins in the Borges story, this knowledge is so heavy induces a kind of paralysis; I don’t want to go anywhere, do anything, take risks. Which is not where I was a few months into my recovery after treatment. Then, I felt uninhibited and impulsive, like I wanted to grab life by the horns and wrestle it to the ground, or ride it over a cliff. I contemplated things like dyeing my hair (which I did), and getting a tattoo (which I didn’t). I felt hungry for new experiences, for higher frequencies of feeling that now terrify me. Who was that person, born again and almost feral at forty? It’s decidedly not who I am this morning.
I share this because I thought perhaps readers in a similar boat could relate.
Well, then 