Uterine tantrums aside, after Find Your Sense of Tumour my heart and head are too full for my Ted Hughes tutorial prep (not to mention that I will always love Sylvia with everything I am and I'm not sure how I feel about her infamous man in black). I'm never going to achieve sustained consideration of metrical patterns if I don't make some attempt to empty myself out first. It's all a bit A Lot. Let me tell you about it.
The Teenage Cancer Trust is a slight misnomer really. They help to fund a number of specialist units in hospitals throughout the UK, but they aim their services at the 'teenage and young adult' age bracket which includes those between nineteen and twenty-five too. They run two weekend conferences each year, one for under eighteens, and one for those between eighteen and twenty-five. The weekend was held at the St George's Park Hilton near Burton-on-Trent, where I rubbed shoulders with the England Women's football team and over 160 other young cancer survivors.
Throughout the weekend there were talks, workshops, and social events. I met another Hodgkin's lymphoma survivor from my unit who is only a year older than me, and someone else who's stem cell transplant was less than a month after mine. I met people who'd had treatments I didn't even know existed (radioactive iodine for thyroid cancer anyone?) and people who'd been diagnosed with cancers I didn't think possible (ocular melanoma!?). Before I went I was slightly concerned that being around so many cancer survivors would plunge me back into the depths of Utter Shit that was my mental state towards the end of my treatment but it turns out this was entirely unfounded - it was incredible. I am so grateful I was given the chance to go.
On Sunday morning, we were shown the premiere of a performance by Toby Peach and Grace Gibson, both theatre practitioners and cancer survivors (Toby also had Hodgkin's lymphoma - it's actually one of the more common cancers among teens and young adults). Toby talked about how getting cancer as a young person is fundamentally different to getting it as an older adult. As an adult, you already know who you are, at least to some extent. If you are a mother, a teacher, someone who has a dog and likes running, a cancer diagnosis is something you can just tack onto the end of that list. At nineteen (the age at which both Toby Peach and I received our initial diagnoses) you're still in the process of figuring that out. You don't have your list yet, so cancer accidentally becomes part of your foundation. This is something I have really struggled with, because I think he is right and I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing, but it's a fine line to walk between honouring the shaping influence your illness has had on you, and being defined by it. I don't want to be The Girl Who Had Cancer but that's something I will always carry with me, something that has shaped the person I am now, something I have no choice but to weave into my personal tapestry.
Until this weekend I hadn't quite realised how difficult it was to carry this invisible story with me. Most of the people I interact with at uni don't know what I went through when I was taking time out of my degree. I normally tell people I was ill then swiftly change the subject because as soon as you mention the dreaded c-word (no, not that one) people get really freaked out. I don't want to spend my whole life making sure other people aren't made uncomfortable by my diagnosis, so I just keep this enormous, cumbersome truth inside my chest. It lurks next to the scar tissue that used to be cancerous tumours and slowly, gradually, it gets heavier. I am so tired.
This weekend, I got to take it out for a while. It sat next to me. I didn't have to lift it up, it just followed me around like an obedient dog. Everyone else there had a dog too. We wore them on our wrists, in the shape of colour-coded wristbands, and I am still wearing mine, which is orange for lymphoma, even though nobody in the real world knows that's what it means. It feels like a secret code. I hope it reminds me to be braver.
I am a notoriously bad talker. I like writing, I overshare online, but when it comes to saying things with my voice, my words fall over each other and crowd together and I can't make myself clear. Talking about my feelings is The Worst. I know my mum worries about me because of this (sorry mum!) - but try as I might, I just can't bring myself to wear my heart on my sleeve. But maybe wearing it on my wrist is the first step. Someone this weekend said that you share your story when you're ready and you can't rush it, but I've had a taste of what it's like to be that little bit lighter, and I don't want that feeling to go away. I am sure I will always be breaking taboos and contending with other people's unspoken assumptions. But you know as well as I do that those things should never have been taboo in the first place. Nobody ever changed anything by accepting things the way they are. Maybe telling my story is scary but it's also important.
Let me introduce you to my dog.
Abi xx
