Come Together, With or Without Cancer

The state of the world is a major buzzkill for me right now. I am one year no evidence of disease; my cancer is one that is historically known to creep up and come back and strike wherever it wants to, so I should be living each day joyfully and gratefully. I am finding that it is getting more and more difficult to live life out loud. Every day, I scroll through my Facebook newsfeed and find another local or world tragedy. I bet my FB friends, the ones that would rather not read about my cancer adventures, are suddenly yearning for some cancer lightness in their feed. That in itself is bull.

I know this is not the forum for politics. It is hard enough reading some of the articles on here when you are living with cancer in some form (your diagnosis, your loved one, etc.) but is anyone else as upset with the day-to-day tragedies that can be controlled and prevented? Is anyone else tired of hearing all the political noise from both parties? Here we are fighting a disease that destroys people and we, in our civilized world, end up destroying each other? How are we ever going to cure cancer if we cannot come together, listen to each other and act civilized?

If we keep going the way we are going, we are all screwed, not just those of us fighting cancer, recovering from cancer or trying to figure out a diagnosis. Think about it. How many people do you know who have had cancer, are fighting cancer or have died from cancer? How many people do you know who have a loved one who has? I am all out of fingers and toes just counting close friends and family without even counting myself and many acquaintances. The world, our country, needs to come together; we have a war that will affect us all that we need to fight. We need a cure.

All I really want is to live each day with joy and love and maybe change a life or two, perhaps by sharing my story about how deadly melanoma is or perhaps by just being a good listener to someone newly introduced to the world of cancer. I also need there to be a cure so that if my cancer comes back or God forbid, someone I love gets diagnosed, we have something to fight it with. We are not each other’s enemies. Cancer is the enemy. We need a cure.

And each day I find myself distracted and disheartened by all the noise, all the hate and all the opinions.

I live in a country that is so advanced and yet so behind it could almost qualify as barely civilized. We are poor in our skills of listening. We talk and talk but never hear what each other says. We lack empathy because we couldn’t possibly imagine being on the other side of the fence. This is America, after all. And if we are on the other side of the fence, perhaps we are a minority, perhaps we worked our ass off to build our own capitalism, perhaps we are fighting wars most people can’t even conceive, perhaps we are waiting for a cure…we are stuck.

The reality is, cancer or not, we are all stuck waiting for the world to come together. Let's make a change. Let's listen. Let's come together.

#heycancernotthisgirl

#curecancer