A cancer manifesto

Why I'm going to keep writing about it

I’m not writing about cancer because I want people to feel sorry for me, because I’m trauma dumping, or because cancer is isolating and lonely and makes you feel like a leper (although, frankly, it does).

I’m not writing about cancer because I’m pointing fingers at anyone for “giving” me cancer — the only fingers I could point would be at environmental polluters and bad genetics, and they don’t care.

I’m not writing about cancer to gain subscribers because the opposite happens when I do write about it and also because I’m not here to try and become popular.

I write about cancer because, in spite of watching a friend take some of her final breaths when she died from cancer, I was radically unprepared for how much cancer would upend every aspect of my life.

I write about cancer because that friend who died was told her cancer was treatable and curable and we all believed it, and this was a lie.

I write about cancer because more poor women and women of color die from the kind of breast cancer I have than affluent white women.

I write about cancer because the state of health care in America is horrifying and punishes the poorest and least resourced among us, and it’s very likely about to get much worse.

I write about cancer because mammograms don’t always work and in fact miss many early stage cancers including my own, and because health insurers refuse to do better.

I write about breast cancer because it’s not just women who get it.

I write about cancer because I walked the streets with friends who had AIDS and they shouted until there were treatments, but because we have successfully gendered and pink-ified and tamed breast cancer into something non-threatening, I don’t see that kind of outrage happening in my own cohort of the sick, and I’m pissed about it. Silence is death, but so is collective resignation.

I write about cancer because I grew up in a religion that taught people that suffering is purifying and holy. It is neither.

I write about cancer because we live in a society where the wealthy and powerful are obsessed with extending their lifespans, and who is weaker or more powerless than the sick?

I write about cancer because writing about cancer is so often about forcing gratitude on people who are terrified they might lose their lives. But forced gratitude isn’t gratitude at all. It’s manipulation.

I write about cancer because you and I don’t need another cancer memoir and that’s not what I’m doing. Instead, I’m pulling at these threads — psychological, spiritual, sociological, medical, gendered — to see what happens when we unravel these myths about cancer, breast cancer in particular, when society thinks breast cancer is tolerable or acceptable or shameful or inevitable, because it is absolutely not.

I write about cancer because I hope to help bring about the end of it.

ACT UP protest, New York, 1988. Image via NPR. Where is the version of this for breast cancer? If anyone knows, please invite me. I’m good at making signs.