Letter to my children: Labels suck, Survivorship rocks

Dearest Beloveds,

If you choose to spend rainy afternoons as adults reading these letters (and maybe my book) from your Momma than you will have gathered by now that I am what is known as a cancer survivor.

Survivor of what? Of life? Of the human experience? You might as well say that every person on this planet is a survivor of one thing or another.

Broken heart survivor

Betrayal survivor

Pain survivor

We would never introduce a friend of ours to a group of people with, “Meet my dear friend Julie, she is also a rape survivor!”

I get it, people are trying to honor me and create a web of common ground. In which case, dear Universe, my vision is to one day be introduced to a new person as, “this is my dear friend Corinna, she also loves duck fat crispies and hanging her laundry outside and the feeling of warm sand on naked skin.” The term survivor is very fraught in our culture because not everyone looks at as a good thing.

I am happy to shout from the rooftops my gratitude for cancer. Cancer taught me to recognize my voice of fear. That experience pushed me to brave enough to be truly me in the world. Warts and all.

I am also incredibly grateful to be here with you two as much as I can, to write, to laugh, to wiggle, to plan, to vision, to dream.

Not everyone looks at being a cancer survivor that way. Some people like to use that label and make it into a pity party. What was a beautiful party with sparkling conversation and laughter takes a detour into “How are you really doing?” “Did they make you do this chemo?” or “What stage were you?”

And your mother has to decide whether to be rude and walk back to the dance floor or be patient and hold someone’s hand and listen their tale of woe and deflect their well-meaning inquiries.

My beloveds, this point is really important. It feeds back into something your father and I have been talking about a lot lately with the two of you. How to do you choose to look at experiences in your life? Do you label them bad or do you label them as good? What do you choose?*

Or as Matthew McConaughey would say - are they looking at cancer survivorship as a green light or a red light? I look at survivorship as a green light. My diagnosis forced me to reexamine my life. Set me on a path of really listening to my soul, then to have the courage to act from what my soul wants.

Who knows if these things would have happened without the razor knife of attention and focus that cancer gifted me. But I know they happened because of cancer and for that I am super grateful.

Sometimes all your momma wants to do is dance. Not be pushed into a conversation about whether our life is a gift or a burden.

Because for me, life is always a gift, especially on the dance floor.

*This is Rob Wergin’s Divine Transmission (#1 of January 2023) - to reinforce this. “The purpose of our life is to have experiences to expand our consciousness. And yes, some of them are not pleasant. But what I have noticed is that those are the most helpful because they motivate us to change. At least that was their purpose. Sometimes we don’t let it motivate us to change. But the most challenging expeiences are motivator. They are catalysts. They are there to help us.”