How I Decided What Kind of Cancer Survivor I Was Going to Be

Nobody hands you a manual for what to do with a medical diagnosis that isn’t quite a death sentence but isn’t nothing either. You figure out who you’re going to be about it mostly by trial and error — and by watching other people navigate the same terrain and deciding, quietly, what you do and don’t want to become.

I have been diagnosed with cancer twice. The first time, I told myself it was a detour. The second time, coming fourteen months after the first, I had to sit with something harder: the possibility that this was not a detour at all, but simply the road.

What I noticed, in the months that followed, was that the people around me were waiting to see what I was going to do with it. Not judging, but just watching. I realized I was watching too. Watching myself, more carefully than I ever had before, to see what I was actually made of when the challenges stopped being hypothetical.

There are a few kinds of cancer survivors. I’ve met most of them.

There are the ones who make their illness the centerpiece of their identity — who organize their entire public self around what they survived, as though the diagnosis were a credential. I understand it. But it never felt right to me. I didn’t want cancer to be the most interesting thing about me.

There are the ones who go silent — who process privately, share nothing, and show up to everything as though nothing happened. I respect that too. But silence, in my case, felt like a form of dishonesty. It happened. It changed things. Pretending otherwise seemed like a waste of whatever the experience was trying to teach me.

There are the ones who perform recovery and embark on the hero’s journey — who take every hard moment and package it immediately into a lesson, a caption, a story with a tidy arc. I’ve been guilty of this. It is a way of staying in control of something that is fundamentally uncontrollable, and it is also, if you are not careful, a way of not actually feeling anything.

And then there are the people who just keep going, sharing their story when it can help others, but otherwise demonstrating through words, actions and deeds that life goes on.

That is who I decided to be. Or at least who I decided to try to be.

The decision came slowly, and it came in parts. It came the morning I got back on the bike during cancer treatment — not because I felt good, but because movement was the most honest language I had for the fact that I was still here. It came when I stopped describing myself as “fighting” cancer — a metaphor I never liked, because it implies that the people who die simply didn’t fight hard enough, which is both false and cruel. It came when I started being willing to say, out loud, that I was scared — not to invite sympathy, but because the pretense of fearlessness was exhausting and unnecessary.

Mostly it came from a question I kept returning to: what do I actually want the rest of this to look like? Not the rest of treatment. The rest of everything.

The answer, when I finally sat still long enough to hear it, was simple. I wanted to keep doing the work I cared about. I wanted to keep training, keep racing, keep showing up first thing in the morning for the particular kind of clarity that only long miles provide. I wanted to be present for the people who mattered most to me — more present than I had been before, when I was busy and distracted and operating under the assumption that there was plenty of time.

Cancer is a terrible teacher. But it teaches.

What kind of cancer survivor you become depends, I think, less on what happened to you and more on what questions you are willing to ask yourself in the aftermath. The answers are already there. The illness just makes them harder to avoid.