Birthday blogging! It has become a tradition (though like everything else blog-related, I’m a week or two behind on it this year). I blog on my birthday not because my birthdays themselves are necessarily all that remarkable or awe-inspiring, but because this regular anniversary provides me with a built-in opportunity for reflection. And my birthday is a reflection “two-fer”, because for me, birthdays are always double-entendre: it’s not only the day I was born, it’s also the day I was told I might die (to be all overly dramatic about it...what I mean is that it’s also the day I got my cancer diagnosis in the doctor’s office). So every year on my birthday, I get to reflect both about the general place I find myself in in my life that year, and about the continually unfolding, deepening lessons I’ve learned from my trajectory through the identity of cancer survivor. I’ve already done some reflecting on the general place I find myself in this year in the last couple of blog entries, so this one is a reflection on the cancer journey.

And what a long, strange journey it’s been. January 22^nd, 2015 marked my 23^rd anniversary of diagnosis with Stage II Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. I was 23 when I was diagnosed, so this year also marks a strange kind of halfway point—as of this writing, I’ve now been a cancer survivor longer than I haven’t been. This cancer survivor piece of me is thoroughly integrated now, and it’s harder and harder for me to remember being any other way. (Not that I particularly want or need to, except as a personal archeology issue.) Though the active part of the cancer experience (diagnosis and treatment) was “only” about 4 months of my now 46 years on the planet, the impact that the cancer experience has had on me over the years has been significant. It rearranged my priorities, gave me a new identity, taught me a bunch of lessons, and, as I’m continually learning to appreciate, had a huge impact on my psychological processes. Even 23 years later, I’m still finding new insights about the ways in which that diagnosis and treatment time affected my personality and the way I now live my life. Some of those ways are useful to me, and I want to keep them; some are not useful any more (though they might have been at some point), and I want to let go of them.

So in the spirit of this anniversarial opportunity for reflection, here are a few things I’ve recently been musing on when I think about the ways in which the cancer experience impacted my psychological processes. These are things that I want to try to heal or let go of (saying them out loud and trying to accept them as real is the first step, right?)

• Cancer’s threat of personal annihilation came at a time when I had just made a big life decision, one of the biggest I had ever made up to that point (and my first real decision about what kind of adult I wanted to be): I had decided to move to Santa Barbara to go to graduate school at UCSB and get my PhD in Sociology, in hopes of at some point becoming a professor. I had just finished my first quarter of my first year in the program at UCSB when the diagnosis came down, and in looking back on it, I can see how in some ways that diagnosis felt like the Universe giving me a big, neon “nope, wrong way” sign. Have other big life decisions I’ve made since then been complicated by the learned experiential anxiety of expecting the Universe to slap me down with consequences if I make too big or bold a move? I don’t know if I have an answer to that one, but it’s an interesting thing to go back and look at in my life history. I didn’t seem to have a problem with decision making when, a little over a year after I was pronounced “in remission”, I made the decision to jump pretty quickly in to a love relationship that led to a marriage only a year later (said marriage has lasted nearly 20 years now, so that seems to have turned out to be a good decision...). I did have a hard time deciding to quit grad school and move back up to the Bay Area soon after we were married, but that decision was complicated by many factors besides the cancer diagnosis. I didn’t struggle with deciding to have children. But I certainly have struggled with a variety of “what do I want to do with my life” decisions since moving back up to the Bay Area (both before and after we had kids). If I’m being honest (and I am), I have to admit that I live with haunting, persistent doubts about whether or not I’m doing what I should be doing with my life (and about whether or not I’m doing what I’m currently doing “right”). Is that because I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop, so to speak, and to be slapped down again if I choose poorly? Or is it because I really feel like I was “saved” for some greater purpose, and if I don’t figure out and fulfill that particular purpose clearly and quickly, the extra lease on life will be revoked and I’ll get sick again? I want to rid myself of this fear of conditions or consequences, and get back my confidence that life is given to us as an unconditional gift without strings attached, that my life is mine to use how I please and that what and how I choose to live is just right and as it should be. (Within reason, of course...I’m not trying to make a case for oppressive, destructive gluttony here or anything.)

• Cancer certainly taught me to live with a greater awareness of the present, and to appreciate the gifts of any given moment right now, while I’m in it. That has been a huge gift for me. But did it also leave me with a greater anxiety around making sure not to “waste” any given moment? I find that, especially in the absence of some clear and specific obligation, expectation or deadline, sometimes I have a hard time ending my day with a positive sense of accomplishment. It always feels like I “should” or “could” be doing more (and/or doing it faster or better or more consciously), that each day should be/have been more meaningful and important. Why else would I have been “allowed” to live beyond the cancer, if not to live a more “important” life more intensely and towards some greater purpose? The dark side of that “live each day like it will be your last” thing is that it makes every day feel full of pressure to make it the Best Day Evah—and what if it’s not? Is that a failure? Or is that just the way it goes, and you have to have some contrast in order to appreciate the extraordinary? I worry that in some crucial way, I’ve lost the ability to be comfortable just having an “ordinary” day, performing “ordinary” tasks at an “ordinary” pace. What does a persistent, daily low-level sense of disappointment and failure do to my sense of self-worth and capacity for self-love? And more importantly, when (and how) can I finally let that go and just accept each day for whatever it brings, without judgment or fear thereof?

• Being diagnosed with cancer was a big deal: a hugely disruptive, clear and obvious tragedy. And therefore, it was in many ways a supremely clarifying experience. It was easy (or at least much easier than it had been) to pinpoint my priorities and what really mattered to me, and to jettison the rest. I had a lot of epiphanies, and leveled up in wisdom a lot faster than I might have otherwise. While on the one hand, I don’t want the drama of tragedy to visit me ever again (no, really, I don’t); on the other hand, I have to admit I liked that clarity, and the ease with which epiphanies and enlightenment came to me when spiced so with danger. I don’t want to fall into the trap of believing that wisdom only comes through suffering, nor to feel like the slow, drip-by-drip wisdom that comes from time and experience isn’t as good as the bright, explosive kind that comes from tragedy. I don’t want my life to be defined by its tragedies, though they are vitally important pieces of my backstory and do in many ways affect my current abilities and actions, so I don’t want to deny them either. I sometimes feel like “cancer survivor” gets to be the most privileged identity in my collection of identity labels, maybe because it was the biggest or most unusual tragedy or because it was imposed from the outside instead of something I chose. But maybe that’s just because I’m still fiddling with balance in my own identity work, yes, even this far out from that experience. I have to remind myself over and over (and here I am doing it again) that on the one hand, cancer was a definitive, identity-making and identity-shifting moment, and on the other, it really didn’t change the basic core of me. (This is like the Jewish teaching to hold two thoughts simultaneously: “The world was made for me” and “I am but dust and ashes”.) I have to hold both simultaneously. That’s hard work, and part of my life-practice. But maybe I also need to keep reminding myself that just because it was dramatic and impressive to others, I don’t have to hold cancer as the most important thing that ever happened to me or as the biggest shaper of my self. I have both before and since had many life experiences that were equally as impactful on my identity. (And besides, who cares what other people think?)

All right, that’s probably enough public navel-gazing for now. It’s been an interesting process trying to think through and pick apart some of these relatively subtle reflections. I’m still musing, and still healing, and probably always will be. Still, I’m grateful to have the opportunity to be doing so. I’m sure next year will bring even yet more insights.