By Linda A
The day I was diagnosed with cancer, I didn’t cry. I didn’t scream. I didn’t even react the way I thought I would. I felt… nothing. Just numb. It was like my mind protected me from the full weight of the news by shutting everything down. And that numbness was just the beginning of what would become the most intense emotional rollercoaster of my life.
At first, I moved through everything in a fog. I went to appointments, signed forms, listened to doctors explain things I barely understood. I smiled politely and nodded while inside I felt like I was floating outside my body. This couldn’t really be happening to me. But eventually, the fog lifted—and when it did, a flood of emotions hit all at once.
Fear came first. A bone-deep fear that crept into everything—my sleep, my meals, my moments alone. What would happen to me? Would I survive? What if the treatment didn’t work? Even with the latest advances in 2025—from targeted therapies to real-time genetic profiling—there’s never a 100% guarantee. And that uncertainty was terrifying.
Then came anger. At my body for “betraying” me. At people who said the wrong thing. At the randomness of it all. I didn’t want to be anyone’s warrior. I didn’t want to be called brave. I just wanted to go back to the life I had before. I wanted to be normal again.
Grief settled in quietly, like fog rolling in. I grieved my old body, my old energy, my old routines. I grieved the illusion of invincibility I’d carried most of my adult life. And alongside that grief came guilt—guilt for not always being positive, for not doing “enough,” for sometimes wishing I could just disappear from it all.
But then, slowly, something shifted. Strength didn’t arrive like a lightning bolt. It showed up in tiny, almost invisible ways. In the way I kept showing up to appointments. In the way I let people help me. In the way I started speaking up for myself during treatment. I learned that strength isn’t about being unshakable. It’s about continuing, even when you're falling apart.
I also learned that emotions don’t follow a neat order. Even now, I cycle through them—sometimes all in one day. And that’s okay. Emotional resilience doesn’t mean having it all together. It means making space for whatever is real in the moment.
If you’d like to read more about this emotional journey, I invite you to read my article, “What I Learned About Myself While Fighting Cancer,” where I share how this experience transformed my relationship with vulnerability and inner strength.
A cancer diagnosis shatters your world—but in the pieces, you start to rebuild. And what you find might surprise you: not just strength, but softness, honesty, and a whole new kind of courage.
