Cancer has been the greatest acting role of my life.
You smile outside when you are screaming inside.
That sentence came out of one of my old journals, and I still recognize the person who wrote it.
Not because every day was dramatic.
Because most of it wasn’t.
Most of it was coffee. Getting dressed. Looking for something I had just put down. Trying to make my body cooperate. Trying to make my brain finish a thought. Answering a phone call in a normal voice.
The performance was normal.
Mornings were the worst
You are supposed to wake up restored.
I woke up already aware of the effort the day was going to require.
After months of treatment and too much time on a couch, ordinary movement had become work. Getting out of bed was not the prelude to the day. Some mornings it was the first accomplishment of the day.
Then came the kitchen.
I had two espresso makers because I kept breaking the carafes.
Five of them, at one point.
So I bounced between the two machines and scavenged thrift stores for replacements.
It sounds funny.
It was funny.
It was also evidence.
There were periods when my hands did not seem to understand what I was asking them to do. There were periods when my brain did not either.
I could be holding an object and have to stare at it while silently repeating what it was and what I intended to do with it.
Not metaphorically.
Literally.
Hold the thing.
Name the thing.
Complete the task.
Do not drop the thing.
Repeat.
The old battery
The best description I had for my energy was an old battery.
There was still a charge in there somewhere.
But it did not hold very long.
On a good day I could spend that charge carefully and make it surprisingly far.
Stress was different.
Stress could take the whole reserve in minutes.
And unlike a phone battery, an hour on the charger did not bring me back.
Once it was gone, it was gone for the day.
That is difficult to explain to people when you still look like yourself.
You can be dressed.
You can be articulate.
You can laugh at a joke.
You can answer an email.
And you can still be operating on the last three percent.
The part people could not see
I am a very private person.
For a long time, I hid the battle from almost everyone except the people closest to me.
I called telling people what was really happening “coming out.”
That may sound odd, but that was how exposed it felt.
The diagnosis was one thing.
The destruction around it was another.
Physical. Mental. Financial.
And the financial damage had its own special cruelty because it kept arriving in envelopes after the appointments were over.
By the end of 2018, the billable cost of my care had passed one million dollars. At the time I wrote about it, I believed roughly $65,000 of that was landing on me personally.
Those are historical numbers from that moment in my life, but I remember what they did to my brain.
Cancer gave me something concrete to fight.
A bill is stranger.
You cannot radiate it.
You cannot cut it out.
You cannot take a pill and watch the balance shrink.
You just keep living while it sits there.
What I was really acting
I was not pretending I was healthy.
I was pretending I was fine.
Those are different things.
“Fine” means the conversation can move on.
Fine means nobody has to worry.
Fine means I can keep my privacy.
Fine means I do not have to explain the carafes, the exhaustion, the blank moments, the fear, the money, the fact that some days I did not recognize the machinery of my own life.
Fine is a very efficient costume.
Until it gets too heavy.
The greatest acting role of my life was not surviving cancer. It was convincing everybody, including myself sometimes, that survival looked normal.
I do not want to perform that part anymore.
That does not mean every hard thing needs an audience.
Privacy still matters to me.
But there is a difference between privacy and disappearance.
And there is a difference between dignity and pretending nothing hurts.
The Unqualified Files lives in that difference.
Still here.
Still fighting.
Still finding humor in the absurdity of it all.
But no longer pretending the absurdity is easy.