Why I Talk About Cancer

I am not a natural oversharer.

Ask anyone who has worked with me for more than five minutes and they will tell you the same thing. I am direct, move fast in a way that sometimes misses nuances, and I have very little patience for drawn-out meetings that could have been emails or quick conversations. I do not traffic in sentiment and I am deeply skeptical of the kind of vulnerability that is performed rather than felt.

So when people ask me why I talk publicly about having cancer — twice, fourteen months apart, in the middle of a demanding career, while training for triathlons and running a large nonprofit — it is a fair question. And the honest answer is more complicated than it might appear.

Because thousands of people shared their stories with me first.

Over the course of more than thirty years in human services, I have sat across from thousands of individuals and families at the worst moments of their lives. People in the grip of addiction. Survivors of domestic violence. Parents who had just buried a child. Individuals living with mental illness who had nowhere else to turn. They sat down across from me — or across from someone in one of our programs — and they told the truth about what was happening to them. Not because it was easy. Because they were brave enough to believe that sharing the burden might help.

That kind of courage is significant. Sharing your pain with a stranger, or with a system that has not always treated people with dignity, requires an act of trust that I have never taken for granted. Those stories changed me. They informed every policy decision, every program design, every funding battle I have ever fought. They are the reason I do this work.

When I got sick, I kept thinking about those people. About what they had been willing to put into the world in hopes that it would make things better — for themselves, for their families, for someone they would never meet who might be sitting in the same chair someday. And I asked myself an uncomfortable question: if they could do that, what exactly was my excuse for staying quiet?

The answer was that I didn’t have one. I had been the recipient of other people’s honesty and courage for three decades. Sharing my own story publicly felt less like a choice and more like a debt I was finally in a position to repay.

Because silence has a cost.

There is a version of cancer survivorship that is essentially private. You go through treatment, you come out the other side, you get on with your life, and you keep the whole experience largely to yourself. I understand that version and respect it. For some people it is exactly the right approach.

But silence also has a cost — not just for the person keeping it, but for everyone who might have benefited from hearing something honest about what the experience is actually like. The intense fear at diagnosis. The strange emotional flatness that sometimes settles in after treatment ends. The way serious illness recalibrates your relationship with time, with work, with the people you love, and with the things you kept telling yourself you would get to eventually.

These are not comfortable topics. They are also not rare experiences. And the more we treat them as unspeakable, the more isolated people feel when they are living through them.

Because I am in a position to say it out loud.

I am a reasonably public figure. I have a platform, a professional reputation, and on most days, enough distance from my own treatment to speak about it with some degree of clarity rather than raw emotion. That combination comes with a responsibility that I take seriously.

Not everyone who has been through this can talk about it publicly. Not everyone has the job security, the professional standing, or the emotional bandwidth to put their illness into the world and deal with what comes back. I do. Which to me means that I should.

Because I share my story in hopes of changing yours.

That line appears in some of my keynotes and I mean it without qualification.

If something I say helps a nonprofit executive build a more resilient organization before their own health crisis forces them to.

If it helps a family member understand what their loved one is going through.

If it gives someone in a treatment chair permission to feel scared and keep going anyway — then the discomfort of talking about it publicly is absolutely worth it.