We don’t come back normal
This week marks 10 years since I was diagnosed with cancer.
I used to describe the experience as “a six-month interruption” in my life. I thought of this time as a paper bookmark that I didn’t intend to keep with me once I read past a certain chapter— as though I were going to charge like a bull to the end of the book.
And that was my original plan after the Hodgkins lymphoma I was suffering from went into remission. I told myself and others that I was going to get my life back to normal — just the way it was before my body developed cancer. I made that choice because that’s what so many friends and family suggested I do, and I didn’t have a reason to disagree.
That approach ended up being the bane of my existence for much of my 30s, which began in the middle of my chemotherapy treatment. Over the first few years of the decade, I painted myself into a corner over my career, my identity and my dreams. I drank from a bottle when I needed therapy and I slept with any willing woman when I needed comfort. I was destroying myself because my life wasn’t the one of noble pursuit that I thought I was living before … it became one where I rejected the idea that I needed to change my life after almost losing it.
I took my time here for granted.
If you were to ask my closest friends and family about me, then one of the most common responses you’d get from each of them is that I’m exponentially hard on myself. And they’re right. It’s a flaw that developed when I chose to live a life in which every day began and ended by asking myself, “What’s the fucking point?”
Such a life was only creating a new cancer inside me for which I refused to find a cure.
Under the circumstances by which we’re all living in 2020, there’s an ongoing debate about how we need to “get back to normal” after we manage to contain or (hopefully) eliminate the deadly virus known as covid-19, which as of this writing has taken the lives of more than 100,000 people in America in the span of three months.
Simultaneously, we’re experiencing a renewed awakening in the battle for civil rights and equality in the wake of the wrongful deaths of several members of the black and African American around the United States, specifically that of George Floyd — who was murdered by a police officer in Minneapolis after holding his knee down onto Floyd’s neck for approximately 8 minutes during an arrest for alleged counterfeiting of a $20 bill used to buy cigarettes.
I don’t like to play games where the degrees of success are rooted around “who has it the worst,” but I can say that while I had my own challenges in fighting and surviving cancer (see the line about booze and women), the struggle for people of color to live in the fair, just and equal society that white people have exclusively curated for centuries is far greater. And those who have long been negatively impacted by systematic racism and injustice need the help of everyone right now to find a cure to this American cancer.
Not next week. Not after Election Day. Right fucking now.
To learn from me is to first acknowledge that a person’s life is made up of habits, trade-offs and luck. What we practice as discipline, how we make our choices and our willingness to face what is beyond our control determines the value of the time we have here in this world.
We can’t go “back to normal.” It took me years to recognize that holding onto the past meant depriving myself of a future. I was making all the wrong choices. I was simply wrong about every decision, every day. And as soon as I realized that, I stopped myself from letting what happened to me yesterday define the rest of my life.
And it didn’t just wash away … to this day, as I approach my 40th birthday with cancer now almost 10 years behind me, I continue to work through my pain and reinvent myself to be a better version than before. I’ve learned to ask for help and I’ve been able to better determine what truly matters and what doesn’t.
As individuals and as a people, where was “normal” taking us? Nowhere good.
How many of us were really doing our part to help lift ALL boats? We’re too wrapped up narcissism and chasing money.
Why have we let the 21st Century continue to be plagued by the norms of yesteryear? When we choose leaders who prove their obvious incompetence time and time again, we keep re-electing them because we fear dramatic change, even if it means things could get better for everyone.
To learn from me is to first acknowledge that a person’s life is made up of habits, trade-offs and luck. What we practice as discipline, how we make our choices and our willingness to face what is beyond our control determines the value of the time we have here in this world. And right now, we need to help each other recognize that everyone’s value is, in fact, equal.
For the immediate future, simply being here will have to be a good enough reason for us to change. I’ll keep working toward a future of my choosing so that I can contribute more and honor those who have helped me along the way.
In time, we will all figure out how to do more and become better. It’s how we can best honor George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and so many others lost to injustice.
I just hope we’re all here to celebrate and appreciate when that time comes. After all … if you’re reading this right now, you’re lucky to even still be here.
I know I am.
I’m David Brandt. You know, from the internet. I’m a writer, Minimalist, Essentialist, cancer survivor, coder, photographer, podcast producer and a variety of other -ers, -ors and -ists. In short, a master of none. I’m on LinkedIn and Instagram.
