I’m a breast cancer survivor, but I’m not a warrior.
“Warrior” — with its implication of fierceness in a fight — doesn’t fit me, even if I sometimes want it to. It’s like the dress I want that looks amazing on the model in the tiny square on the online shopping site. Sure, it flows on her, but I’m not 5-foot-11 — or 25 years old. In the same way, although I fought cancer, I’m not a warrior.
My apologies to those who gave me pink ribbon–themed warrior T-shirts (which I quietly put in the giveaway pile). I appreciate and understand the gesture. After all, everyone prefers to be seen as a badass, not a scaredy-cat.
But when it comes down to it, I’m just a woman who had cancer, did what she had to do to treat it, and is trying to keep going.
When Fighting Is the Only Option
“Warrior” asks a lot of us, and sometimes the ask is just unfair, if not impossible.
This isn’t to say I’m not a fighter. I’m certainly willing and able to fight when a foe emerges: when someone has threatened someone I love, or when insurance companies do what some insurance companies do. In those cases, I gear up, devise a battle plan, exert my strength, and sally forth. I don’t have to fight; I choose to.
But when that foe turned out to be cancer, I found myself less than enamored with the idea that I was suddenly some kind armor-clad Amazonian, infinitely fearless. I did what all women in my shoes do: I fought because I had no other choice. I showed up for the appointments. I made the best and most informed decisions I could about my treatment. I endured what I had to endure — in my case, a double mastectomy and DIEP flap reconstruction, radiation, and now, years of a hormone receptor blocker to (hopefully) forestall a recurrence.
I was scared. We’re all scared. But we move forward no matter what, because the other option isn’t an option at all. We fight because our instinct as humans prompts us to.
But once you’re through the worst of it, and someone tells you it all looks good and you can think in the future tense again, you’re left with an uncomfortable realization: When those cheerleading you call you a warrior, it’s easy to slip into the belief that your “success” in fighting cancer was directly related to your strength in battle. You fought, and you’re here. But others fought with the exact same verve, were exactly as brave, had the exact same T-shirts, and are not here.
So, who’s the warrior? Who would want to be one?
Holding the Warrior Pose
The day we told our teenage sons that I had cancer, my husband and I made a considered decision to lead with the positive: “Mom is going to be fine, but here’s what you need to know.”
That’s a warrior pose — apologies to my yogi friends. It means, “I’m going into battle, and I’m going to return to you victorious. You can count on that, and you can count on me.”
I don’t necessarily regret taking that stance with them. They weren’t yet adults, and they’ll always be my children no matter how old they are, but I do sometimes wonder if that made them see me as more impervious than I felt at the time, or feel now.
Maybe it wasn’t honest.
Though I was trying to be a warrior for them, inside I was quaking. The week before my main surgery date I existed in a vortex of anxiety so intense I felt like if one thing went wrong I might explode. The day I found out that one of the sentinel lymph nodes removed during the surgery had some microscopic cancer cells in it, that I would likely need radiation after my surgical scars healed a bit, I came home and cried like … well, not like a warrior. It was sloppy and undignified and made a mess of the shirt my husband was wearing that day.
It’s true that every battle can leave you exhausted as often as it renders you exhilarated, but there’s something extra about the cancer battle. It’s not even the fact of it, the treatment pain, the side effects, or the fear of the unknown. Those will always be difficult fights. It’s when you’re supposed to maintain the mantle of a warrior that things can go sideways.
Because feeling that you must hold the warrior pose places an invisible burden on people like me. Once you say you’re a warrior, a fighter, a badass, you’re stuck with that label. It’s a label that doesn’t leave much room for the bad days, like the one that ended with my husband’s chest daubed with snot, or the ones where I stared up at the rotating arm of the radiation machine, imagining the invisible lasers slicing through my chest wall and feeling unimaginably vulnerable and small. The ones where, even years out from treatment, I still wonder when the hammer will drop and I’ll be back to frequent appointments or further treatments.
If someone bangs down my door in the dead of night, I’m going to fight. If a test or a scan in my future isn’t the “good” kind, I’ll locate my strength again and do what needs to be done. But I didn’t want to be a warrior back then, and I don’t want that label now. To be honest, the word “survivor” doesn’t sit right either — because while survival means you’re still here, it doesn’t mean you’re free and clear, out of the woods, safe.
I suspect that if you check with other breast cancer “survivors,” even the ones who didn’t slip their badass pink-ribbon T-shirts into the donation bin, they’d say something similar. Might be worth asking.