Just started your cancer journey? Read this.

That discomfort you’re feeling? It’s grief.

When you learn that you or a loved one has cancer, the world stops spinning on its axis. All sound is replaced with the rushing water whoosh of a mega-storm. You can see the doctor’s lips moving. Some part of your subconscious mind dimly registers what they’re saying, but the audio is distorted.

To your dumbstruck ears, it sounds a bit like the adults in Charlie Brown cartoons – mwa-mwa-mwa. You lose the illusion of tomorrow, even if you’ve always known that tomorrow is never guaranteed. You lose who you were before cancer entered your life. You will mourn that person. Even if you emerge from this journey a stronger, more conscious and resilient you.

You’re entering an era of illumination. One you wish you could close your eyes to.

With all that you lose, you gain things too. Not all of them welcome. You gain a new language, becoming fluent in once-foreign medical jargon. These words and phrases will take root in your long-term memory. Years from now, whenever you hear or read one, all the emotions you’re feeling today will flood your body.

In the coming weeks and months, you will learn things you wish you could unlearn. See things you can never unsee. Do things you never thought you would. Or could. You will surprise yourself. You will disappoint yourself. You will make yourself proud. Sometimes all in a single day.

Things that used to hold meaning will cease to…temporarily.

Getting dressed, putting make-up on, working out, eating healthy, pursuing hobbies – all of the things you once saw value in will suddenly seem pointless and meaningless. Why should you look good when you feel crummy? Why focus on your health when it is going to shit?

There will come a point when you realize that these things may matter little – or greatly – in the grand scheme of things, but they have value now. In the moment. Because they boost your mood. Make you feel ready to take on the world. Give you some small sense of normalcy. Reclaim these things when you’re ready. You’ll know when that is.

Life doesn’t stop, even when it feels like your world has.

You will resent this at first. When you scroll your social media feeds and see images of happy people living their lives, when you read messages of hope and positivity, you will feel a range of emotions. Anger. Sadness. Despair. Envy. You will feel set apart from life and the living. You see it. You can exist alongside it, but you can’t seem to feel it. This experience, like all emotion, is temporary. It’s discombobulating. It’s disorienting. It’s isolating.

Give yourself permission to feel whatever you’re feeling (even the absence of feeling). No guilt. No judgement. Feel it, honour it, sit with it, talk about it. Then think about what makes you feel alive and find a way to drag some of that into that void you’re existing in. It will become a lifeline you can use to pull yourself back into your life. A life irrevocably changed, yes. But now you fully understand the value of that life – and a year, a month, a week, a day, an hour, a minute, a second of it. And you’ll never forget.

You might feel guilty when you start to live again.

Love, levity, hope, and optimism are buoyant emotions. You can try to suppress them, but they will bubble up in you at the strangest times, irrepressibly effervescent. You will laugh at jokes – even wildly inappropriate ones. Sometimes at wildly inappropriate times. Hope will bloom in your heart when you feel the sun on your face. Even when the news you’re hearing is anything but sunny.

You may feel guilty about feeling good when you think you shouldn’t. When you or a loved one are suffering. When you should be serious. Then you’ll dispense with the should’s and stop measuring other people by them as well. Start holding space for what is – whatever is.

This is a marathon, not a sprint.

You might be tempted to charge ahead in warrior mode – doing everything you can, learning everything you can, making the most of every hour of every day. That way lies burnout, even for the most productive among us.

You’re running a marathon, with no clear finish line in sight. You need to pace yourself. To rest. To become bored. To take care of you. To be patient with yourself. To be kind to yourself. To show yourself some love. To give the same to others.

Unsure how to navigate any or all of the above?

I can help. Let’s chat.