You don’t have to act strong; you can be strong.” This isn’t just a catchy phrase—it’s a powerful truth I’ve discovered after nearly 30 years of surviving cancer. You might think that after all this time, I’d embrace the old saying, “What doesn’t kill you will only make you stronger,” but honestly, I don’t. It’s a nice idea, but it doesn’t offer a roadmap for the emotional journey from where I was to where I am now. After many years of survivorship, I’ve come to understand what real strength means and how to achieve it.
Understanding True Strength: Beyond the Surface
At 24, I was diagnosed with an aggressive malignant brain tumor and was told no one with my diagnosis had lived more than six months. We didn’t talk about dying in my family. “We don’t need to think about things that might not happen. We can’t get depressed,” my mom would say. But couldn’t we admit we were scared to death and had no idea what to do? No, we thought we had to “stay strong” if I was going to survive.
I did everything I could to “stay strong.” I read every self-help book I could find, took notes, and absorbed all those positive messages until I began to think their ideas were actually my ideas. I took charge, managed all aspects of my healing, had a positive attitude, and made all the right changes in my life—eating better, exercising, choosing to do what I was passionate about. I joined a patient empowerment program, started visualizing, doing yoga, exploring holistic medicine, and setting life goals. All these were part of my toolkit of coping strategies to help me “feel strong” and “stay strong.”
The Real Challenge: Emotional Healing
I considered myself the perfect “Power Coper,” but I hadn’t even begun what I would later learn was the critical step in moving on from my illness: healing emotionally by acknowledging and feeling through the trauma of having had cancer.
To heal emotionally, I had to stop all this doing and start feeling. Sure, I had been told so many times about the importance of expressing my feelings, but I simply could not do it. It wasn’t natural for me, and honestly, not feeling was a way of protecting myself.
It wasn’t until five years after my diagnosis, when I was out of the danger zone and then faced with another unrelated medical problem, that all the feelings I had stuffed for so long came pouring out. The floodgates opened when a near stranger asked me, “Why are you so different?” Without knowing it, he put words to exactly what I had been feeling for a very long time. I did feel different, misunderstood, and alone.
My cancer had taken my carefree young adult years and added a level of maturity I did not want. It seemed I couldn’t relate to anyone anymore, and realizing this brought incredible sadness. Once I started to feel, it lasted a long time.
Finding Strength Through Emotional Healing
Why was I so different? And who am I now? If I re-engage in life, will it all be taken away again? To heal emotionally, I had to allow myself to feel that pain before I could move forward. I had to say goodbye to who I had been before I could discover who I was becoming.
It was this emotional healing—the pain of confronting the difficult feelings—where I found my true strength. In discovering this strength, I quit acting strong and started being strong. “Being strong” to me meant being real and vulnerable. It takes great strength to be authentic. Being authentic was pretty uncomfortable for me at first, but it has made my life after cancer incredibly rich.
