“You’re so brave.”

“You’re so strong.”

“You’re such an inspiration.”

People mean well when they say these things to someone with cancer. They’re trying to tell you they admire you. They’re trying to encourage you. Sometimes they simply have no idea what else to say.

But what if you don’t want to be inspiring?

What if you’re tired of being brave and strong and positive? What if you would much rather be ordinary?

Because somewhere along the way, “inspiring” can start to feel like another job.

You already have enough jobs. There are appointments to schedule, scans to endure, medications to remember, side effects to manage, work to keep up with, people to reassure, and a life that somehow still expects to be lived.

And you may find yourself thinking, “Seriously? Cancer wasn’t enough? Now I have to inspire people too?”

That’s a lot. (Translation if you need it: "F*ck that sh*t.")

You hear people talk about resilience all the time. And yes, resilience can be a wonderful thing. It can help you get through incredibly difficult experiences.

But sometimes you don’t want to become more resilient.

Sometimes you just want the things requiring all that resilience to STOP HAPPENING.

You don’t necessarily want to learn another lesson. You don’t want to discover another hidden reserve of strength. You don’t want someone telling you that everything happens for a reason.

You want a boring, completely unremarkable Tuesday when nothing happens (followed by a Wednesday through Monday just like it).

And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.

Cancer can create some strange expectations. People around you may be more comfortable when you’re upbeat. When you’re “fighting.” When you can find something meaningful or positive in what happened.

When you’re doing okay, they don’t have to confront quite so directly the scary reality of what happened to you, or the fact that something like this could happen to them too.

But you are allowed to be irritated.

You are allowed to be frightened.

You are allowed to be bored with talking about cancer.

You are allowed to make wildly inappropriate jokes about it (I highly recommend that you do).

You are allowed to have a bad day without turning it into a growth opportunity.

And you are allowed to be thoroughly unimpressed with the entire experience.

None of that means you’re giving up.

It means you’re a human being having a human response to something you never asked for.

Maybe the goal isn’t to become the inspirational cancer patient.

Maybe the goal is to stop performing your cancer experience for everyone else and give yourself permission to actually have it. The messy feelings. The contradictory feelings. The days when you’re grateful to be alive and the days when you’re furious that this happened at all.

You don’t owe anyone a lesson from your cancer.

You don’t owe anyone positivity.

And you certainly don’t have to turn one of the hardest experiences of your life into somebody else’s inspirational story.

You get to just be you.

Funny. Angry. Scared. Hopeful. Exhausted. Happy. Cranky. Ordinary.

Sometimes even resilient. When you’re in the mood.

But you don’t have to make resilience your personality. And you definitely don’t have to perform it for anybody else.

If you’re tired of feeling like you have to be strong, positive, brave, or inspiring when you’d really rather just feel however you actually feel, I can help.

You don’t need anyone’s permission to feel what you feel. But if some part of you is still waiting for that permission, we can work on that too.

Moving forward after cancer doesn’t mean pretending the anger, fear, grief, and everything else aren’t there. It means dealing with them so they don’t get to keep running your life.

If you’re ready to stop performing “fine” and start figuring out what you need to feel like yourself again, book a call with me. We can talk about where you are now, where you want to be, and how I can help you get there.

No inspiration required.

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