My Bad Luck Thoughts

The truth is, I’ve been putting off telling the real, raw stories about how I navigated the years between 2017-2022. I was raised to “fake it ‘til you make it” and confused that approach with pretending things were fine when they weren’t. I pushed a lot down because I couldn’t deal with it until I was forced to, head-on. 

When I was diagnosed with Denovo Stage 4/metastatic cancer (I am focusing on using “metastatic” in my everyday life so that it seems less “death-y”), I was newly postpartum with a 2-month-old and a 2-year-old. Stage 4/Metastatic means that cancer has spread from the primary tumor to other organs throughout the body, and de novo means that my first diagnosis was after the cancer had spread. 

My mom and closest confidant had died just three years before from a different type of metastatic cancer- Melanoma. I immediately thought that my life would be short, even shorter than my mom’s.

I expected that I wouldn’t see my kids grow up, and I wasn’t sure they would even remember me because of how young they were then. After I received a diagnosis, I couldn’t even look at them or hold my newborn baby because of how sad these things made me. In movies, it seems like moms with cancer immediately have a plan to make sure their kids never forget them. My reality was that I was so devastated by all of this that I mentally had to check out, and it was tough to come back in. 

People often comment on my strength for getting through these ugly things. I guess maybe from the outside, it did seem that way. I think I  took the idea of toxic positivity too far and thought if I pretended I was fine, I could simply power through the horrible parts and act like they never happened. 

I had quite a few non-ideal coping mechanisms through this process. One was that I bought all black and white clothes as a treatment uniform because it helped me feel more invisible. My body went through so much between grief, pregnancy (that too, in a pandemic, fuck me), and chemotherapy. The changes made me feel ashamed, and I just wanted to hide. 

This may appear confusing because, during this time, I posted inspiring things and smiley bald photos on Instagram! I had great, positive text conversations with my friends! I went to Pilates! I swear, I felt positive and happy in all of these things; they just didn’t cover the other things I felt. 

Whenever I tried to gently tell the whole story and suggest that it was way worse than I was letting on, I felt like my pain made people too uncomfortable. I returned to reframing everything from a place of positivity and self-deprecation because that received a much more positive response than my death jokes. I was so uneasy about the situation; I didn’t want to ruin other people’s perceptions of my experience. 

This mechanism started when my mom got sick and kept going through both pregnancies, a pandemic, job uncertainty, and cancer. I hoped that if I could force things to be good or even pretend they were good, maybe magically, they would be. I also worried that expressing the difficult sides would unintentionally ask the universe for more things I did not want.  

The magic didn’t happen like that. I would lay in bed at night, scared, motherless, unable to taste anything, losing my hair, swollen from steroids, feeling hideous, sick as can be, and wishing it could all end because of how miserable I was. 

I didn’t care what “end” meant. I could die, I could be cured, I knew my mom wasn’t coming back. Whatever caused this agony, I wanted it to be over and done with. I didn’t want this to be my life. I wanted nothing to do with it. 

I didn’t want to go to the oncologist’s office once a week and endure curious looks about what someone my age was “in for.” I didn’t want to decide whether to wear a wig during job interviews or show up bald. I didn’t want to attend support groups focused on end-of-life planning. 

I didn’t want to see anyone because of the way I looked. I was incredibly embarrassed by what the years of grief, pregnancy, and treatment had done to my body. I tried to have fun and be normal, but the old version of normal was no longer accessible, and I was painfully mourning that loss. 

The magic and the strength for me didn’t come from surviving cancer. The healthcare professionals and medicines made sure I did that. It involved me very little. Feeling strong finally came from facing the darkest, ugliest thoughts and both feeling and wrestling with them. It took admitting just how dark it had gotten, even though externally, I had succumbed to the pressure to make it seem like I had everything under control and things were fine.

I’ve realized that the braver I feel about telling my story and sharing with people- the more they’re willing to share about their bad luck. (note: this my folksy code for “shitty horrific, terrible things I did not want to experience in any way, shape or form.”) Some of my best conversations in the last few years have been after I awkwardly blurted out, “I HAVE STAGE 4 CANCER!!” to some poor, unsuspecting new friend. Afterward, they felt comfortable talking shit about horrible things with me. 

While I am trying to unsubscribe from toxic positivity, I’m finally at a point where I can see how these experiences have forced me to evolve in the best way possible. I finally understand that seeing the positive in one thing does not mean other things are not categorically terrible. This realization helped me finally understand the destination that years of therapy have tried to lead me to: it can be both.

I promise to write about my experiences from the most vulnerable and honest place possible. I will never say that I have all the answers or that things will be smooth sailing in my life from now on.  By this point, I realized that life doesn’t work that way. More importantly, I understand that grief and pain are neither linear nor logical.