I made a video recently about five mistakes I made when I finished cancer treatment. And apparently a lot of you related to it.
So I made another one. Five more mistakes. And apparently a lot of you related to that one too.
Which has made me think a lot about this weird space after cancer treatment ends.
Because I don't think I made these mistakes because I was careless. I think I made them because I didn't know how to do this part.
I knew how to do cancer treatment. You show up. You get the chemo. You have the surgery. You go to radiation. You take the medications. You go to the appointments. You get the bloodwork. You do the scans.
There is a plan.
And then eventually someone tells you that you're done.
Except...
You're not actually done.
Your appointments slow down. People stop checking on you quite as often. Everyone around you is relieved that the worst is over.
And you're standing there thinking, Okay. Now what?
I thought I was supposed to go back to my life.
Instead, I've spent most of this year learning that finishing cancer treatment and recovering from cancer treatment are two entirely different things.
And I made a lot of mistakes while figuring that out.
During treatment, I became incredibly sensitive to stimulation. Noise. Light. Crowds. Too many conversations happening at once. So I adapted. I wore earplugs. I used a sleep mask. I blocked things out whenever I could because my nervous system already felt like it was taking in too much.
And those tools helped me.
Until they didn't.
Because eventually I realized I had gotten so good at protecting myself from stimulation that my tolerance for stimulation had gotten even smaller. Normal sounds felt LOUD. Normal light felt BRIGHT. Places I used to exist in without thinking about them suddenly felt overwhelming.
I had protected myself so well that I hadn't given my nervous system many opportunities to learn that these things were safe again.
So I've had to slowly expose myself to the world again. Not by ripping out the earplugs and forcing myself to tolerate everything. That's the kind of shit I probably would have done before cancer.
Now I'm learning there is a whole lot of space between avoidance and bulldozing through discomfort. Sometimes rebuilding capacity means experiencing a little bit of discomfort, noticing that I'm okay, recovering, and trying again.
I also tried to go back to normal WAY too fast.
This might be one of the biggest mistakes I made.
I really thought treatment would end and my energy would come back. Maybe not immediately. But relatively quickly.
I had spent months getting through chemo, surgery and radiation. Surely when I stopped actively poisoning, cutting and burning my body, it would start feeling better.
Right?
Except recovery doesn't work like that.
I would have a good day and think, I'M BACK.
And then I would use every ounce of energy available to me. Work. Workout. Errands. Kids. Clean the house. Make dinner. Do all the things I hadn't been able to do.
And then I would crash.
Sometimes for a day. Sometimes longer.
It took me an embarrassingly long time to understand that having energy wasn't permission to spend all of it.
Cancer treatment changed my capacity. Radiation fatigue lasted so much longer than I expected it to. My body was healing from surgery. I was adjusting to medications. I had been thrown into surgical menopause. My nervous system had spent a year responding to one threat after another.
Of course my energy wasn't normal.
But I kept comparing what I could do to what I could do before cancer. And every time I couldn't meet that standard, I felt like I was failing.
Eventually I had to stop asking, Why can't I do what I used to do?
And start asking, What does my body actually have available today?
Those are very different questions.
At one point I literally had alarms on my phone telling me to rest.
That is how bad I was at stopping.
The alarm would go off and I would think, I'll just finish this first. Or, I'm feeling pretty good today. Or, I don't really need it.
And eventually the alarms just became another notification I swiped away.
Which is kind of hilarious in retrospect.
I had identified the problem. Created a system to address the problem. And then decided I was the exception to my own system.
Because there was always something that felt more important than resting. Someone needed something. There was work to do. Laundry. Dinner. A workout. An email. One more thing.
Rest was always the easiest thing to sacrifice because rest didn't produce anything.
And I have spent a lot of my life attaching my value to how useful I can be.
Cancer didn't magically undo that. If anything, recovery exposed it.
I have had to learn that rest isn't the thing I earn when everything else is finished.
Because everything else is never fucking finished.
Rest has to be part of the plan.
I also went back to group fitness before I was ready, which is especially ridiculous because I am a coach.
I KNOW how to modify. I know how to scale. I know that your workout should meet you where you are.
I know all the things.
And then you put me in a room with other people lifting weights and apparently all that knowledge leaves my body.
I missed working out with people. I missed feeling strong. I missed being an athlete instead of a cancer patient.
So I went back.
And I could do the workouts.
That was the problem.
Because being physically capable of getting through a workout is not the same thing as being recovered enough to handle the cost of that workout.
I would feel great while I was there and then spend the next day—or two—paying for it.
I had to relearn what effort felt like in this body. I had to learn the difference between discomfort and danger. I had to learn that stopping before I absolutely had to stop wasn't weakness.
And I had to separate exercise from proving something.
Some days movement needed to be lifting weights. Some days it needed to be walking. Mobility. Breathing. Yoga. Lying on the floor.
Recovery forced me to reconsider what "counts."
Turns out, a lot more counts than I used to think.
Another thing I didn't expect was how quickly I would stop telling people how I was actually doing.
During treatment, people ask how you're doing all the time.
And then treatment ends.
You have hair again. You're working again. You're exercising again. You look fine.
And eventually you start saying you're fine too.
Even when you're not.
I think some of this was because I didn't know how to explain what was happening. How do you tell someone, "My scans are clear and I'm incredibly grateful and also I am having one of the hardest periods of my entire cancer experience"?
Because that didn't make sense to me either.
Some of my darkest moments came AFTER treatment.
During treatment, I had a job.
Stay alive.
Keep moving forward.
Get to the next appointment. The next infusion. The next surgery. The next radiation treatment.
Afterward, I finally had enough space to understand what had happened to me.
How close I had come to losing my life.
What had changed.
What wasn't coming back.
And how fucking heavy that was.
I stopped talking because I thought I should be okay.
And that made an already lonely experience lonelier.
I think part of that came from believing that finishing treatment meant I should feel finished.
Treatment ended.
Cancer did not disappear from my life.
There were still medications. Still side effects. Still appointments. Still bloodwork. Still scans. Still pain. Still questions about reconstruction. Still a body that didn't feel like mine. Still fear. Still grief. Still healing.
I think there's a strange societal finish line around cancer treatment.
You ring the bell. Everyone celebrates.
And they should.
Finishing treatment is enormous.
But finishing isn't the same thing as being finished.
I didn't walk out of radiation and magically become the person I had been before cancer.
Honestly, I'm not sure that person exists anymore.
And I don't mean that in some inspirational "cancer made me a better person" way.
I mean cancer changed me.
My body changed. My priorities changed. My relationships changed. My understanding of safety changed. My understanding of time changed.
Recovery has been less about finding my way back to who I was and more about figuring out who I am now.
I also genuinely believed good scans would make me feel safe again.
If the scans are good, I'll stop being afraid.
Then I got good scans.
And my brain said:
Cool.
But what about that headache?
What about your foot hurting when you wake up?
What about being tired today?
What about your stomach hurting?
What about that weird number on your bloodwork?
Before cancer, those things were just...things.
A headache was a headache. Being tired meant I was tired. A sore foot meant I probably did something to my foot.
Now?
My foot hurts and I wonder if it's neuropathy. I'm exhausted and I wonder if the cancer is back. I have a headache and somewhere in my brain the words brain tumor appear.
My stomach hurts and my mind can find an organ for cancer to be growing in before I've even finished registering the sensation.
An abnormal blood test can send my brain places I don't want to go.
My scans can tell me there is no evidence of disease. They cannot erase the fact that my body once contained something that could have killed me without me knowing it was there.
That changes your relationship with your body.
I've had to learn that trusting my body doesn't mean believing nothing bad will ever happen again.
I can't promise myself that.
Trust looks more like knowing I will notice. I will ask questions. I will advocate for myself. I will get things checked. I will adapt.
And then I will keep living.
Even afraid.
Of course, because I am me, I also tried to be really fucking good at recovery.
I'm a coach.
Give me a problem and I want a plan.
Protein? Got it.
Movement? Absolutely.
Sleep. Hydration. Mobility. Breathwork. Meditation. Medication. Appointments. Stress management.
Tell me what to do and I will DO THE SHIT OUT OF IT.
Except recovery is not a test you can ace.
And I accidentally turned healing into another place where I could fail.
If I was exhausted, what had I done wrong?
If I hurt, had I trained too hard?
If I felt sad, was I not doing enough nervous system regulation?
If my body didn't change the way I wanted it to, was I eating wrong?
There was always another lever I could pull. Another habit I could optimize. Another thing I could blame myself for.
Eventually I started realizing that maybe the goal wasn't to optimize my way out of being human.
Sometimes I am tired because my body has been through a tremendous amount.
Sometimes I'm sad because something sad happened to me.
Sometimes my body hurts.
Sometimes I need rest.
Sometimes I can do everything "right" and still have a shitty day.
The goal isn't perfect recovery.
I'm not even sure that exists.
I'm trying to make care easier. I'm trying to build capacity. I'm trying to support my body instead of constantly evaluating its performance.
That's different.
One of the hardest things for me to reconcile has been gratitude and grief.
I am alive.
I need to start there.
I know how unbelievably lucky I am to be able to write that sentence.
My scans are clear. Treatment worked. I get to raise my kids. I get to coach. I get to build a company. I get to stand in the woods and watch the light move through the trees. I get to make coffee. I get to laugh with my husband. I get to plan things for next year.
I get to want things again.
I am so fucking grateful.
And.
Cancer took things from me.
Both of those sentences are true.
I lost my breasts. I lost my ovaries. I lost parts of my body I hadn't realized I would grieve until they were gone.
I lost the assumption that my body would continue behaving predictably. I lost a version of my future that I thought was guaranteed. I lost some innocence around growing older.
There are things I miss.
There are things I'm angry about.
There are days I look at my body and don't want to acknowledge what cancer took from it because it feels easier to tell myself that my body is going to change again anyway.
There are days I grieve the life I don't get to live.
That doesn't make me ungrateful.
Gratitude for survival does not cancel grief for what changed.
I'm learning I have enough room for both.
And underneath almost every mistake I've made has been this belief that needing rest meant I wasn't doing enough.
I thought recovery would look like progressively doing more.
More work. More exercise. More parenting. More business. More life.
And therefore, if I needed to do less, something was wrong.
But my capacity isn't a measure of my worth.
That sentence has taken me a long time to believe.
Some days I can coach, write, work out, make dinner and still have something left at the end of the day.
Some days I hit a wall.
And when I hit that wall, I cannot motivational-quote my way through it.
Cancer fatigue taught me that there is a difference between being tired and having nothing left.
Pushing through doesn't magically create more capacity.
Sometimes it just steals it from tomorrow.
So now I am trying to notice earlier.
Before the crash.
Before I am completely empty.
Before my body has to scream because I ignored every whisper.
I don't always get it right.
Actually, I still get it wrong all the time.
But I'm listening.
And maybe that's the thing I wish someone had explained to me when treatment ended.
I thought I was supposed to go back.
Back to normal. Back to my old body. Back to my old energy. Back to my workouts. Back to my life.
Back to being me.
But recovery hasn't been about going backward.
It has been about learning this body.
Learning its signals. Learning what makes it feel safe. Learning when discomfort is something I can gently explore and when my body is asking me to stop.
Learning how to expand my capacity without bulldozing my boundaries.
Learning that strength doesn't always look like pushing.
Learning that rest doesn't have to be earned.
Learning that grief and gratitude can sit at the same table.
Learning that fear can come along for the ride without being allowed to drive.
And slowly, slowly, learning how to trust my body again.
Not because I believe nothing bad will ever happen.
Cancer took that illusion away from me.
But because I trust myself to pay attention. To ask questions. To advocate. To adapt. To rest. To grieve. To try again.
To keep living.
There is so much support around getting people through cancer treatment.
There should be.
Treatment kept me alive.
But there is this enormous space afterward that I don't think we talk about enough.
The space between treatment ending and feeling like yourself again.
Maybe not your old self.
Maybe someone you haven't completely met yet.
That's the space I've been trying to understand this year.
And, as it turns out, I've made a shitload of mistakes while figuring it out.
But I'm starting to think maybe that's what recovery actually looks like.
Not getting it right.
Not getting back.
Learning.
Noticing.
Adjusting.
And continuing to live while you're still figuring it out.