Why Are People So Obsessed With Cancer Patients "Getting Back to Normal?"

Throughout my cancer diagnosis, people kept telling me that after chemo I could “get back to normal” or “go back to normal.” That’s the phrase people use: “get back,” “go back.” I paid attention to the number of times that people said this to me, and the phrasing. They almost always use this exact phrase, as if it is somehow stored in all of our collective lexicon, just sitting there waiting for a moment to be deployed.

The closer I got to the end of my chemo, the more people said this to me.

The closer I got to the end of my chemo, the more people phrased it as a question, “Aren’t you excited to get back to normal?!”

I never knew what to say because the honest answer I had to this isn’t what people were searching for, so I just said, “Yes.”

“You don’t seem excited,” someone said to me.

I just took a really big breath and said, “I’m not sure how to tell you the truth.”

In some ways, it’s true, I am “back” to normal. I am over a month out from my last chemo. I am doing cardio every day and it feels really good. I am cooking for myself again. I have passed my last chemo, which means I’ve passed my last chemo crash. My hair has stopped falling out.

I’ve re-established my bedtime routine that I wasn’t able to do during chemo. Even doing my Korean skincare routine took too much out of me on bad weeks, and stopping and starting made me feel like I was playing peek-a-boo with normalcy, so I let things go like washing my face and cooking. My bedtime routine is so mundane, it’s hardly worth writing about, except that maybe the mundane nature of it might tell you how sick I was that I couldn’t complete it.

My bedtime routine is bricking my phone at 9pm, letting the dogs out, then feeding them. I “turn down” my kitchen, wiping away any crumbs and putting the dishes in the dishwasher. The dishes in the dishwasher part feels particularly poignant in that friends started doing this for me quietly when they stacked up in my sink because I had so little energy that sometimes doing the dishes made me winded. Then I head upstairs, wash my face, meditate, journal, read, and go to bed. This, on the worst days of my chemo, wasn’t something I could do spread out over 24 hours, let alone in 60 minutes.

Take a minute. Pause. Think about it. If for six months you were unable to do the dishes, would you still be the same person you were before those six months? If you couldn’t even wash your face, would you emerge as some solid self who can just bounce back to the before times? If you faced a brush with death at 34, would there still be a you to “get back” to?

When you have cancer, you become a mirror for people.

You become a mirror for other people’s grief, with the countless senseless, inappropriate, heartless grievers who respond to your cancer with the story of someone they loved dying of it, as if this is any comfort. People who have not been on the receiving end of this told me over and over to be kind about it, but I couldn’t. I silently cursed every person who said this to me, wickedly angry that when I told them, “I have cancer,” their response was to talk to me about death.

You become a mirror for people’s feelings of control. So many questions about my cancer revolved around people hoping that if they just did something, were something, had something, they wouldn’t be this unlucky. Instead of luck, they see it as your unique due. As an alcoholic, more than one person told me it was the drinking. Vegans I used to be friends with told me it was the meat. And so many people sighed sighs of relief when I told them, actually, it’s my bloodline, my genes, as if any of them knew if there wasn’t a fuse inside them too, lurking. People want to be sure they cannot become you, that if they just do things “right,” they won’t get cancer like you, who did things “wrong.”

You become a mirror for people’s feelings about sickness. While eating brunch at Mara, someone who reads my work came over to me and said, “I’m SO GLAD you’re out eating,” to which I responded, “Should I hide in my house?” This is something I had to ask over and over as people applauded me for being sick and out in the world. Sometimes their surprise at seeing me felt more complicated than being happy. Sometimes, it felt like because I was out, I wasn’t so sick, which made them feel more comfortable about a young woman diagnosed with cancer, even as I sometimes collapsed at home on the couch immediately upon arriving home from the monumental effort continuing to live in the world took. Underscored at the bottom of all of this is people feeling that the sick should disappear and that it is extra-ordinary if you do not, or that you are “not that sick” if you refuse to let your sickness take the world from you.

You become a mirror for people’s feelings about mortality. More than one person asked me, “Are you going to die?” Or they ask about your staging to check for themselves. My response to these requests early on was, “I’m ready to die. Are you?” I was tired, exhausted really, by the effort it took to manage people’s emotions that I stopped responding with kindness and started responding with the same brazenness people approached me with. Sometimes, I would say, “Maybe. Why?” using the same tone of voice you might use if someone asked if you had a light, forcing, really forcing, the person who asked me this question to tell me why they asked it. When people stammered, embarrassed, I didn’t stop, thinking that was enough. I asked again, more directly: “Why are you asking me if I’m going to die?”

This is not how the sick are supposed to behave. Especially not women. We are supposed to understand people’s discomfort, be quiet about it, and teach them how to hold us gently. I was too exhausted to wash my face, and I was too exhausted to pretend like these interactions were fine. I developed standard responses to all of these questions. But there was something about the getting back to normal comments that I couldn’t find the words to respond to. I was trying to figure out why people said this. While the other comments felt really psychologically transparent, this one felt more complicated. What were people looking for from me when they asked it?

There are so many things that I think people are hoping to see from me, but a full recovery is one of them. A hero’s story! A triumph! She’s so young! She has to stay in the world! And maybe if you look at me now, you see the getting back to normal part and dust off your hands and think to yourself, “She’s back to the land of the well.”

But if you look closely at my right arm, you can see a splotch where the chemo leaked out during my last chemo, leaving a mark that will never disappear from my body. I have a matching one on my left hand, hardly noticeable to strangers, very noticeable to me.

If you see me with my hair down and not under a hat, as only a few people have, you will see the hair is still missing and won’t regrow to the length of the rest of my hair for years. Years.

If you look at my liver, you’ll see more toxicity than before.

If you look at my ovaries, you’ll see that they have stopped working–and might never restart. You’ll see fertility stolen from me. You’ll see the dream of a child taken like a diamond ring might be stolen from a house.

If you look at both of my armpits, you’ll see one is larger than the other due to complications from my surgery. And if you look really closely at me while I chop vegetables, you’ll see me wince in a pain caused by that complication. Any repetition hurts. Still, you’ll see me trying–because pain won’t take the things I love from me.

If you watch me try to take a nap on the couch, you’ll see my hands move suddenly as the pins and needles come in from neuropathy. If you’re there on a particularly bad day, you’ll hear me say, “Fuck,” while I shake my hands trying to make it stop.

If you look at my heart, you’ll see me telling a man I was dating that I had cancer, and you’ll see him tell me that the cancer means an ending. And if you look at my body, you’ll see that my breasts are gone, marked with an armpit-to-armpit scar, which means dating in the future will require me to find someone who has desexualized women’s worth–and that? How many people have done that?

If you look at a tiny snapshot of the exact moment when I learned I had cancer, you will see tears fall out of my eyes in one of my favorite coffee shops, and then see me running home, and then see me slam the door shut, double over, and scream. I’m writing this from the exact spot I learned I had cancer, drinking the same drink I was drinking that morning. When I close my eyes, I can feel my stomach drop the way it did in that moment. As I ran home, I screamed at god, “My whole life is in front of me.”

How can I go back to the woman I was before this moment? She doesn’t exist anymore.

Early on in my diagnosis, my therapist said, “You seem calmer about the cancer than I imagined.” My response to her was, “I am not the person I was two weeks ago.” She nodded, and we sat in silence for a long time, letting the sound of the white noise machine fill the space. Early on, I knew there was never anywhere to “go back” to.

The moment I was diagnosed is a fissure. It is a tectonic plate moving, cracking, and breaking in two. It is a glass shattering on the floor into dozens of tiny shards, so small they can’t be put back together. It is the second in which the deer hits a bumper and two bodies fly forward: yours and the deer’s. If you’ve ever hit a deer, you know that you never look at them the same way again. Every night drive, you scan more thoroughly into the woods. Every deer standing ready to run in the ditch sends a flurry of fast heartbeats into your body. And most of them never run out into the road. Most of them just stand there. But every deer you see, it reminds you of the crash.

For things like car accidents and robberies at gunpoint, no one asks you, “Are you excited to get back to normal?” What a ridiculous question to ask someone after their entire house has been cleared out of valuables. We understand that your house being pillaged changes you, makes you more wary of every sound in the night. What an equally ridiculous question to ask someone after their body has been ravaged for parts and pumped full of poison in an attempt to save their life. Yet, people who have never had to face their death ask it all the time.

I don’t understand why people talk about cancer like this: the number of strangers and acquaintances I meet in the world who insist on telling me to go backwards. What if I don’t want to go backwards? What if there’s nothing to go back to? What if everything I knew about who I was has been lit on fire and I’m digging in the ash to find anything worth saving?

While I have my bedtime routine down pat, my morning one feels less certain. I start most of my mornings in tears. As soon as I wake up, they come out of my eyes, and I don’t always even know why. I was warned about this from other survivors. It’s purgatory. It’s a liminal space. It’s the in between. Once you are through active treatment, once your brain starts to feel safe, that’s when the grief creeps in. There are so many ways to respond to this and my response is to do the same thing I did when I learned I had cancer: I run. Every single morning, I get out of bed and take to the road trying to keep the thoughts of recurrence at bay.

Through my active treatment, I wasn’t quite sure why people kept telling me, “It will be good to get back to normal.” It wasn’t until I reached the end that I realized that what people were hoping for was that I could be a mirror for them here, too. If I can return to normal, when they get sick, they can, too.

I feel like I know, now, why people are asking. They want me to comfort them with my own story, to tell them that sickness is like a foreign country you visit and return home with stories about and jet lag that passes quickly. They want me to tell them that it’s not a place that scars you forever. They want me to be proof that there are some extra resilient people who enter the land of the ill and come back swinging into the land of the living. They want me to, somehow, be a “good sick person” who doesn’t linger on illness, but rather, beats it and just gets on with her life.

They want me to tell them that the woman sitting in the coffee shop one second before the text message referring her to oncology is the same woman who was unsure if she was going to die at 34. I can’t. I’m sorry.

More than once, I have found myself crying simply and only because I am 34. I sometimes say it out into the air, “I am 34.” Once, I screamed it in a parking lot at the gym when I wasn’t able to run for more than 90 seconds, “I am 34.” I am in the prime of my life. The people around me are getting married, or having children, or hitting career milestones, and my milestone is that this morning, I cooked eggs for the first time in six months. These are my 2026 milestones: tiny glimmers of the most mundane parts of life.

How do I tell you that while it has shattered me, it has also solidified me? How do I tell you that when you realize there is no you to “get back” to, the whole world opens up, that the screaming in the car about being 34 is both about my misfortune and also the great task of redefining myself for the next chapter of my hopefully long life? How do I tell you that if you, too, enter the land of the sick, the person you were before won’t be waiting for you at the end of it, that you’ll be someone brand new?