silence like a cancer grows

Chicken Soup for the Soul is doing an essay contest for cancer survivors. I am a cancer survivor, my sister is battling a terminal cancer, and I am determined to be published in this book.

Please help me as my story evolves into a finished piece. Please understand that my writing style is to free write, and then edit. This is by no means a finished story. And everything in this diary is copywrited!!!!!!!

trying to write something like this is such a process. trying to weed out the important from the personal. attempting to develop a plot, something worth reading. my experiences with cancer are such a huge part of who i am. and i’ve always felt it was important to tell the story. and so here i am sitting, trying and trying to tell it. and it won’t come out. i write stupid sentences that always start with some little anecdotal message. a slogan for surviving. but there is no slogan to surviving.

so i start to think about cancer. and i wanted to wrtie about running. because ever since my diagnosis, i have run from all difficulties. always, i am a coward. and people say i’m brave, that i pick myself up. but that is a lie. the only hard thing i’ve ever done is leave jason. everything else was easy, i always choose the easy way. but how is that  lesson? hey, i survivied, and now i’m a mega-coward!

then i was thinking about my happiness is… calendars. every year the ABTA comes out with a calendar. where brain tumor patients submit artwork displaing what makes them happy. i’ve been published in this calendar twice. and i thought, this is it, i can write about what makes me happy. but god, how boring is that to tell people what makes me happy?

so i sit, and i think, and i’m being all writers blocky. being pissy with adam because i’m pissy at everything. pissy mostly because i got in too deep too fast and he’s not making time for me the way i want him to. but being pissy none the less. adding myspace friends and being pissy, when i hear this lyric "silence like a cancer grows"

and then it fucking hits me. surviving cancer is all about ending the silence. it’s about the allan friedman t-shirts, and the out of line jokes, the care pages, the calendars, glow bug, not giving blow jobs, its about saying HEY! i did it, fucking listen to me.!

or maybe it isn’t that exactly, but god, awareness feels so good.

**Work in progress**