The elephant in the room

The babble at the start of a lecture. ABI and FELLOW STUDENT are sitting next to one another. They take out their notebooks as they converse.

ABI: Hey, I don't think I got your name?
FELLOW STUDENT: I'm [name].
ABI: Abi.
FELLOW STUDENT: I don't think I've seen you round before?
ABI: Yeah, I wasn't here last year, I was taking a couple of years out of uni. Anyway do you remember who's lecturing today. I am so unprepared...

***

See the lightning speed at which I change the subject? I often mention an unspecific illness before quickly shifting the focus back onto some other person, and it's not really because of embarrassment or anxiety, at least not for myself. I worry about everyone else. I don't want to scare anybody away. The ability of the word 'cancer' to strike terror into the heart of people is a double-edged sword that gives me real leverage when talking to the dragons at the uni GP reception, but which leaves me dancing in a cloud of allusion and obliquity when talking to people I actually think are cool.

It's a bit like that question of how many dates should you go on before you disclose that you have a prosthetic foot or something. It's logistics - something which makes up an important part of me and my story but which is firmly in the realms of Too Much for casual acquaintances. But there's no concrete point at which someone graduates to the status of friend and gets handed a neat package of Information I Have Not Yet Disclosed. There's no totally casual and cool way to tell some that, by the way, for the two years I was away from uni, I was actually beating a stage four cancer diagnosis, but no biggie. It's totally fine and I'm fine now, and hey, where are you going?

My last post talked about forging new identities in recovery. I was recently reading some postcolonial literary theory, and what struck me is this idea of colonialism stifling a national culture. When the indigenous people begin to rebel against the invading forces, a stagnant culture is revitalised and a new national identity is forged that incorporates the colonial struggle as an integral part of it. This is a little bit like how I feel. I don't want to identify myself purely as a cancer survivor, but at the same time, the experience is written into me, and to attempt to leave that entirely behind means omitting an important and influential period in my personal history.

The tale of my life from 2014-2016 is something I wish people would know without me having to directly tell them. It's analogous, I think, to the experiences of some LGBT+ people - wanting everybody to know they're, for example, gay without constantly having to come out to every person they meet. You want it to be an accepted fact so everyone can move on in full knowledge of contexts and without fear of misunderstandings.

The difficulty seems to lie in a deep and pervasive taboo around subjects like this. Society still stigmatises minority sexual orientations and gender identities, so this constant coming out carries a degree of risk. Along the same lines, society has a habit of dehumanising disease, either by placing sufferers on a pedestal and a lauding their 'bravery', or by separating the disease from the person and making it into something ghastly and untouchable. Incidentally this is the direction I'm hoping to pursue with my undergrad dissertation (no stealing my ideas kthx), but the implication in real life is that I live in constant awareness that disclosing my history as cancer patient might permanently alter the way others look at me. People tend to either run away or treat me like a delicate flower, when really, I'm probably the most resilient person in the room. I wish we could get past this mythologising of cancer and have a good laugh about how stupid I looked when I had no eyebrows (shoutout to Emma and Jade for tonight's dinner chat which was a bloody delight).

The way we think about cancer remains so deeply problematic. I'm taking a module focusing on modern literature, and I've been struck by how often authors and perhaps more surprisingly, lecturers, use cancer as a metaphor for pretty much anything. I've found this so disquieting that I wrote a bit of poetry on it the other day (tw: heckin pretentious):

the sprawling city mutating like a cancer
and the work of e.m.forster
holds a mirror up to my body

gross and sickening
you toss the image into your poetry
and it divides and conquers
those little words become so many malignant cells
like
a
cancer

you claim to sympathise
but the echoes only amplify
your disgust

it’s age and modernity and depression and every construct of every society in human history
the bile of the memories in me
again
make me your simile

with the quickening of my pulse
and the gathering of my breaths
my shame grows in me
like a cancer

It's in response to this commodification, this catch-all use of the imagery, that I've actually considered emailing professors and asking for trigger warnings for any mention at all of cancer. And it's not that the subject itself is a difficult one for me, it's the way it is invariably approached - a way that makes me feel like I'm part of a dystopia instead of a living breathing student.

So if you're reading this as someone who has recently met me: Hi. I'm Abi, I'm 21 and in the two years I took out of my course, I was busy having cancer. I swear it's fine, I'm as normal as I ever was. Ask me about it if you want, make that borderline offensive joke, I promise you I can handle it, and so can you because when it really comes down to it there's not an awful lot to handle anyway.

Abi xx