What Sustains Me in a Time of Political Cancer

My two cancer journeys taught me how to be resilient in a country that is very sick

Photo by Paul Macallan on Unsplash

This is the first in a series of posts about the practices that are sustaining me during our political and social upheaval.

I did not expect breast cancer to come back. Neither, apparently, did my surgeon. “Your cancer can’t come back,” he said as he prepared the ultrasound. I heard the shift in his tone as soon as he looked at the spot causing the concern. “Oh…that does look concerning.”

He hadn’t believed it would be cancer four years earlier, either, when the a routine mammogram showed micro-calcifications in my left breast. He definitely did not believe that it could have possibly spread to my sentinel node. I was too young. The spot was too small. He was wrong on both counts.

Many of us were wrong about America’s cancer, too. We said “there’s no way he’ll be the candidate” when in July 2015, Donald Trump declared his candidacy for presidency in a speech where referred to most Mexican Americans as rapists, drug dealers, and criminals. Even as he began to win primaries, we were confident. On Election Day in 2016, many of us walked away from polling places fully assured that we had just elected the first woman president, only to have our hearts broken the next day. But in 2020, we thought that we were finally done with him, that his less rabid supporters had seen the truth of who he was. If his disastrous handling of COVID hadn’t convinced them, surely, we thought, his attempted coup on January 6 would. Plus, there was that tradition that party candidates could only run for presidency twice. Our cancer was gone and it couldn’t come back. Or so we thought.

Like this second Trump administration, my second diagnosis was much more destabilizing. I no longer had the assurance that I would survive. This thing was really out to get me, it seemed. I had to learn how to live with the reality that a stray cancer cell could be lurking in my body, silently growing, waiting for its opportunity to strike again, perhaps fatally.

Feel familiar? We are still in the first 100 days of this second Trump administration. Everyday we awake wondering what fresh hell we are facing. We wonder who will be harmed today and what we need to do to protect others and ourselves. Everyday decisions require more effort than before. We are not sure if it’s okay to make long-term plans. That purchase or home improvement that we’d planned for this year suddenly seems too risky. In February, when I traveled to Minnesota for a writing residency, I carried my passport just in case. “You might have to meet us somewhere,” my husband said. Our political anxiety is high enough that we’ve repeatedly discussed what other countries we might flee to if necessary. The number of African Americans considering at least temporary expatriation has increased exponentially since November.

In reality, flight is not an option for most of us. What, then, should we do? I learned a few lessons during my cancer journeys that might help us out.

Give Yourself Some Grace…Actually, A Lot of It

Cancer is an incredibly disruptive crisis. One day you’re living your life and the next, you are spending every waking moment researching, undergoing, and recovering from treatment. But you still have to pay the bills (let’s not even talk about how tracking medical bills is a part-time job in itself), buy groceries, and get the kids through school. I had to learn to let go of some stuff, including being the super-mom who showed up at all the school functions. Do you know how many germs are in a school? No way was I subjecting my immune system to that! For a full year, I didn’t go to anything. And guess what? The kid is fine.

Both at work and at home, I had to learn to be okay with letting other people take care of things. No, the house wasn’t going to be clean the way that I wanted it to be. And meals? Yeah, throw nutrition out the window. With one set of chemo drugs, I could only tolerate starchy foods. I practically lived off baked potatoes, blueberry muffins, applesauce, and rice noodle soup. And I decided that the best option for my parenting stress was to stay out of my husband and son’s decisions about what they were going to eat. Sitting upstairs in my recliner as they carried on life downstairs, I learned that they could manage without my over involvement.

With little daily energy, I had to learn to prioritize my activities wisely. Is there anything that absolutely has to get done today? What’s the one thing that I could do to make myself feel like a whole person? Everything else was optional.

If you’re feeling worn out by the news cycle, it’s natural. It’s actually part of Trump’s design. The demise of democracy is not life-as-usual, and you don’t have to pretend that it is. Figure out what absolutely needs to be done. Figure out the one act of resistance that you have within you for today. Let some things go.

Find Your Joy

With each surgery, chemotherapy infusion, and radiation session, my immune system weakened and my cancer diagnoses, I had to cancel almost all the plans that I had made for the coming year. But I was determined to hold onto some things. I refused to let the disease take over my whole life. A few weeks after my second mastectomy, my family headed to Orlando for the Disney Christmas that we had planned months before the diagnosis. Some things were off-limits for me: I couldn’t enjoy the hotel pool, I could only do gentle rides, and I rode through Magic Kingdom and Epcot in a wheelchair. I still had one of my surgery drains in. My surgical physician’s assistant called mid-trip to talk my husband through its removal (that was wild).

Six months later, I surprised my radiologist when I asked if we could delay the start of my radiation treatments by a few weeks. The schedule had been thrown off when my oncologist decided to terminate chemo early. I wanted to stick to the original schedule of starting in August. “Why?” he said, frowning slightly. “My cousin and I have tickets to see Janet Jackson perform in Vegas,” I said. He looked through my chart then smiled and said, “Go see Janet. We’ll start as soon as you come back.”

I have celebrated birthdays and book launches during treatment. I have gone to conferences that mattered to me. I taught one course during both of my diagnoses, not because I was trying to be an academic overachiever, but because I knew that it was important to have something other than cancer occupy my mind.

We fight better when we have joy to live for. Find your joy even in the midst of the political shitstorm we’re in.

Go Ahead…Let Out a Stream of Profanity

After a lifetime of being a good Christian girl whose high school classmates wouldn’t even use foul language around her, cancer taught me to curse. I’d be home by myself, going about my day as usual when suddenly the weight of what I was facing would fall on me. And I would let loose. About 30 seconds of profanity would make me feel better. Later, I would learn that there’s research on the health benefits of cursing. So then I started cursing out loud. It’s become a bit of a habit now, not because I’m trying to be shocking, but mainly because there are a lot of things happening in the world that can best be expressed by a well-chosen curse word. You do realize that when Jesus called people a “brood of vipers” that he was really saying, “you MFers,” right?

Maybe it’s not cursing (but really, it may need to be), but find whatever the thing is that allows you to release steam. Don’t let it build up, because it is far too likely to explode in ways that you cannot control, perhaps in the direction of people you love. Don’t let other people be the collateral damage in your repressed rage. Rage is not sinful; it’s an appropriate reaction to injustice. It’s a sign of disappointed hope, of knowing that we could and should do better than we are right now. As long as you rage, you still hope. And we need all the hope that we can muster.

The Fear Gets Better

Over time, my fear of cancer diminished. I stopped having daily thoughts that I could be dying. The fear has not completely gone away. It rears its head again when I have some new bodily symptom that an internet search ALWAYS reveals could be a sign of cancer (I don’t know if there’s a single medical symptom that could not be a sign of cancer). I suspect that my cancer anxiety will always be with me.

In some ways, that has been a gift because I am more committed to living for the moment. I am more determined to find the cracks that exist in painful places and to bloom within them.

Cancer taught me that I am more resilient than I thought. All of us are. And we’re not in this alone. We can do this, together.

I’ll continue this series next week. In the meantime, leave a comment and let us know how you’re doing. Hopefully this post has reminded you of your own capacity for resilience.

Good News for No Trifling Matter!

This week, I received a notice from Substack that No Trifling Matter reached the #50 spot in the Faith & Spirituality category. It was a short-lived, but notable achievement (it seems to have fallen off already). The top 50 lists on Substack are overwhelmingly White. And the Faith & Spirituality category has a lot of conservative-leaning sites on it. For a minute, though, we were there! I’m grateful for all the support. It still blows my mind that thousands of people are reading my posts every week.

Registration Is Live for Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction

It’s official: in a few weeks, I will be offering the world-renowned Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction program on Wednesdays. After years of integrating mindfulness into my courses, I finally had the chance to teach the full MBSR program last fall. I believe it is one of the most important courses that I’ll ever teach. And now you don’t have to be a student at Columbia Theological Seminary to take it with me. The course meets on Wednesdays from 6-8:30pm eastern, beginning with orientation on April 30. Visit this page for more information and to register.