Why I'm Starting My Substack Over
I've made a ton of mistakes; here and in the life I fought so hard to keep. It's time to tell the truth.
“What now!?”
Standing on the dock in the quiet bay outside my childhood home. Back from six months of intense chemotherapy. Not even 18 years old.
“What am I supposed to do now? Why did you keep me alive?”
I screamed, at nothing. At the mountains in the distance. At God.
These are not the things cancer survivors are supposed to think or say. We are supposed to be grateful and happy and inspirational.
I had been the picture-perfect cancer patient. Determined, optimistic, I rarely even questioned it or felt any anger. I don’t think I even cried. By my own volition, everything was just: this is what we have to do if I want to live, and I did. I wanted a second chance to grow up and become someone - someone other than the nerdy outcast I’d been before. The girl that the popular boys barked at in the halls. The girl who ate lunch alone in her car. And started college two years early just to escape the politics of adolesence.
A stage IV, the last of the stages for my type, was my permission slip to start over, making a life I actually wanted to live. All I had to do was fight for it.
I fought. I won. Now here I was, back in this tiny mountain town, feeling more alone than ever.
This was not the euphoric post-treatment experience they had promised me.
They said if I made it through, I’d have a long, happy, healthy life. Now I was looking at that long life in front of me like the barrel of a gun. Shuttering at the idea of feeling like this forever.
I couldn’t forget what I’d seen. The magic in the swaying palm trees outside my bedroom back in California. The pulse I felt in the dirty LA streets on the way to the hospital every day. How everything and everyone was magic.
But teenagers don’t want to talk about that kind of thing. They don’t want to talk about mortality; they are young, careless, and free. They couldn’t relate and I couldn’t go back to living with the ignorance of my own temporality.
I got my life back, but cancer had killed my naivety.
There would be no forgetting: I am always running out of time. To live. To become. To create something worth leaving behind.
Not only that, I had lost all my hair. I was bald, covered in new scars, and more than 40 pounds overweight thanks to a steroid in my chemo. I looked - and felt - like an alien, and yet I was expected to go back to ‘normal’ and be everything a young woman should be. Beautiful, desirable, successful. Was that expectation told to me directly? Of course not. But I felt. I wasn’t the girl that the boys wanted to touch and hold. I wasn’t pleasant to look at. People would call me ‘beautiful’ and I sensed the pity in their eyes; I knew they were saying it with a dark pitch, a twinge of fear for their own fragility. They called me beautiful to make themselves feel better.
In such a quick flash, seemingly overnight, that inspiring cancer patient turned into an existentially-confused, lost and angry survivor.
God didn’t give me an answer that day. I screamed until tears came to my eyes. I stared at every bird, tree, cloud, looking for a sign. But nothing came.
I walked off the dock determined to find answers. Why I was still here. What I was supposed to do with my life to pay back this massive debt of still being alive. There had to be something I could accomplish to prove all the people right that had worked so hard to save me, and justify all the time and money they’d spent. For me.
And yet, this life was mine, right?
This is my story, isn’t it?
I spent the next two decades trying to balance my own dreams of being a writer, making a positive impact while I had the time, creating a big, full and beautiful life full of every kind of emotion and experience…with the pressure to live up to something impossible:
To be everything to everyone.
To please everyone.
Because I owed them, after all, didn’t I? For saving me? For letting me stay here on earth?
This is the story of what I’ve learned
From two decades of trying to shrink myself literally and metaphorically,
through eating disorders and people pleasing and ‘playing small’, in order to not make anyone question why I got to live.
From desperately trying to chase my own dreams and be my own person,
from London to LA to New York and back again. From taking the risk to be absolutely broke, a starving artist, to playing the 9-5 game and hating every minute of it, and back to broke again. Risking the respect of people I love in order to choose myself and my potential.
From starting womanhood over from scratch,
bald and overweight and alien, to feeling at home in my body again and even getting to the point I could use my body to make art. To make the world more beautiful.
This is how I find beauty in every single day; because I have to, in order to remember what the fight was for back then, and through everyday struggles, big and small.
These are the stories I have been ashamed to tell because I thought I didn’t ‘do it right.’ Because I am somehow a bad survivor.
To hell with my belief I had to be inspiring and perfect the rest of my second-chance life. This is the truth. I hope you’ll stick around. It’s going to be a wild ride.