Kind Like Katey

There’s this weird thing that happens after cancer treatment.

Your hair starts growing back.

Your color comes back.

You start going places again. You’re back to work full time. You laugh. You make plans. You post pictures where you look like yourself.

And everybody thinks you’re better.

Hell, sometimes I try really hard to make them think I’m better.

I try to make everything look normal because I desperately want everything to feel normal.

But it doesn’t.

I still get hit with exhaustion out of nowhere. Not regular I stayed up too late tired. The kind where my body suddenly reminds me of everything it has been through.

I still get scared.

I still feel a pain somewhere and immediately wonder what it means.

I still have moments where I don’t want to think about anything stressful because I feel like I’ve already used up my lifetime supply of stress.

Except life doesn’t give a shit that you had cancer.

Work is still work. Bills are still bills. People still have problems. People still complain. People still expect things from you.

And lately, I don’t have the same tolerance for bullshit that I used to.

That’s something I struggle with.

My whole thing is kindness. Kind Like Katey. I believe in being a good person. I believe you can be kind and still be strong.

But sometimes I feel like I’m pretending.

Like I’m putting on the April everyone expects.

Smile.

Be nice.

Handle it.

Help everybody.

Keep moving.

Meanwhile, there’s this other version of me underneath all of that thinking:

I don’t fucking care about this right now.

And then I feel guilty for feeling that way.

Because that doesn’t feel like me.

But honestly, I don’t know exactly who “me” is anymore.

I feel like a shadow of the person I was before cancer.

The old me went through life assuming there would always be more life. She worried about stupid things. She rushed. She stressed herself out over things that probably didn’t deserve that much of her energy.

I miss her sometimes.

I miss how easy it was for her to believe everything was going to be okay.

But I can’t go back to being her because I know things she didn’t know yet.

I know what it feels like to hear the word cancer.

I know what it feels like to lose my hair.

I know what it feels like to look at my body after losing part of it.

I know what it feels like to wonder if treatment worked.

I know what it feels like to be afraid of what comes next.

That changes a person.

And one of the hardest parts is trying to figure out who this new person is while everyone around you is treating you like the old one.

When I looked sick, people checked on me.

They asked how I was doing. They worried. They reached out.

Then my hair started growing back.

I went back to work.

I started looking normal again.

And some of that stopped.

Even family.

I don’t think people necessarily mean anything bad by it. I think when you look okay, people assume you are okay.

But sometimes it makes me wonder if people only care when something is actively wrong. When there’s an appointment. A surgery. Chemo. Something scary enough to remind them to ask.

Recovery isn’t as visible.

Nobody sees the exhaustion.

Nobody sees the random fear.

Nobody sees you lying there wondering if that pain you just felt is nothing—or something.

Nobody sees how fucking tired you are of thinking about cancer while simultaneously being terrified to stop thinking about it.

They just see your hair.

And hair apparently means we’re all good now.

We’re not.

At least I’m not.

I’m living my life. I’m working. I’m laughing. I’m camping. I’m making plans. I’m writing this blog. I’m trying to enjoy the things I almost took for granted before.

But I’m also moving through life differently now.

Slower.

I want to take things in.

I want to notice things.

I don’t want to spend whatever time I have worrying about shit that doesn’t matter.

And that’s hard when the world still expects you to care about all the same things you cared about before.

Maybe that’s what life after cancer really is.

Not getting back to normal.

Maybe it’s realizing normal doesn’t exist anymore.

I lost part of myself physically.

I lost part of myself mentally.

And I’m still trying to figure out what grew in its place.

So if I seem like myself, but not quite—

that’s because I’m not.

I’m still here.

I’m just not the same person who walked into cancer.

And maybe I need to stop trying so damn hard to be her.

Sometimes I wonder if Katey felt this way too.

That’s a hard thought for me.

Did we stop checking on her as much when she looked okay? Did I see her hair growing back, hear her laugh, watch her doing normal things and assume she was doing better than she really was?

Did she ever feel like everyone else had moved on while she was still trying to figure out who she was after cancer?

Did she ever feel like a shadow of herself?

I wish I could ask her.

There are so many things about what she went through that I understand differently now because I’ve lived some of them myself. Things I thought I understood back then—but I didn’t.

Not really.

I couldn’t have.

And now I find myself wishing I could sit down with her and say, I get it now.

I get why you were tired.

I get why you were scared.

I get why some things probably didn’t seem as important anymore.

I get how strange it is when the world starts treating you like everything is normal again, but you know you’re not the same person you were before.

I understand so much more now.

And she’s not here for me to tell her.

God, I wish she was.