“The deepest wounds aren't the ones we get from other people hurting us. They are the wounds we give ourselves when we hurt other people.”
― Isobelle Carmody, Alyzon Whitestarr
When I was 20, I did a pretty shitty thing.
I broke up with my boyfriend while he was having cancer treatment. Literally. When we had the break up conversation, he was sitting in the doctor's chair receiving a blood transfusion to boost his thoroughly battered immune system. He'd lost more than a few kilos and all of his hair, and would now be facing chemo alone. This came after weeks of me pushing him away and avoiding the conversation - all because I didn't want to be the girl who broke up with her cancer patient boyfriend.
I didn't take the break up lightly. I looked at it quite matter of factly - as an inevitable conclusion. I rationalised all the reasons we shouldn't be together any more - I wasn't ready for such a serious relationship, I wanted space to figure out who I was as a person before I tethered myself to someone, I was worried about becoming so dependent on someone I would lose myself - all the things that are important when you're forming your fledgling adult identity. I talked it through with my mum. We both cried about him going through treatment alone, and reasoned that a sense of pity or obligation wasn't a good reason to persevere with a teenage relationship that my heart knew was no longer right. By the time he was sitting in the doctor's chair and we were having that conversation via phone, I felt like I'd already separated myself emotionally and was ready to move on.
So we got on with it. We broke up, and muddled through the process of disentangling our lives and learning to live without each other. I still accompanied him to chemo, and he was still a part of my family as we all tried to support him. It was painful, it was confusing. We both dated other people, while continuing to see each other. We toyed with getting back together.
Though I didn’t really know it at the time, I was selfish and emotionally demanding, and intent on protecting my own ego - I needed him to need me. We hurt each other. In reality, the break up was probably no better or worse than a break up with your first love will ever be. Cancer was hardly a factor - for me at least. It was just a temporary state of being that would be over soon enough. As time passed, we detached and tried to move on.
Eventually, his health improved. He finished his course of chemo and received a clean bill of health. His hair grew back. His health recovered. He went back to work. I busied myself with work, life, and growing up. We'd both survived. Cancer became a thing that happened once, but barely needed to be thought about.
Or so I thought. A few years later, as I grew out of selfish adolescence and finally acquired some emotional awareness and a sense of empathy, my feelings changed. I finally realised what it must be like to be faced with your own mortality at the age of 21. I became racked with guilt about having done this to someone I cared so much about. And I understood that I was lucky to be able to walk away from such an ordeal because the cancer wasn't really happening to me - no matter how much I felt like it was. I felt I'd been emotionally callous, and utterly unaware of how vulnerable he was. I unintentionally found myself dealing with delayed onset shame about how I had behaved
So I did everything I could to try and absolve myself. I begged for him to take me back. I endured whatever he would throw at me, and I punished myself, thinking all the while that I deserved what I got, and that the only way I could forgive myself was for him to forgive me. But it never happened. He was resentful at being abandoned, and far more aware than I was that us getting back together for absolution's sake was a terrible idea. In many ways, he'd moved on, and wasn't interested in opening up his old wounds for the sake of healing mine.
After several years of avoiding it, I now dragged my shame around like a weight I'd involuntarily agreed to carry - not willing to put it down and let myself off the hook. I was upset at myself for lacking the empathy to be able to deal with the situation selflessly and maturely. I became convinced I would never earn or deserve the same level of vulnerability from anyone ever again. Over the years, break up guilt had become mixed up with cancer guilt and the shame of how poorly I had dealt with the situation got the better of me. It was like I had swept my guilt under the rug, and it had quietly grown roots. It became my cancer. Eventually, my own health began to suffer until I had no option but to seek out treatment to help me resolve the toxic emotions that were seeping into every area of my life.
They say time heals old wounds, but it's my experience that this is only true if you actually treat them. I've also found that the wounds that hurt the most are not those which are inflicted on you, but those you inflict on others. Now I gave myself no option but to stare at them directly - breaking apart my teenage thought processes, and forcing myself to put everything back together with the benefit of hindsight. I still don't really understand where to draw the line between cancer guilt and break up guilt - they feed each other, and neither is constructive - but I now understand that it doesn't matter which is which, it just matters that I no longer hold on to them.
We caught up recently. 10 years - almost to the day - since he started chemo. I asked him the questions I'd wanted answers to and he gave them freely and honestly. Were you aware of the possibility that you might die? Only during my final PET scan when I started thinking about the possibility I might not be in remission. Other than that I never thought about it. Did it change how you think about your health? Only in the last stages of treatment when had to walk my bike rather than ride it and I realised what it did to my body. Did you feel vulnerable and abandoned, or just abandoned? It was a break up.
Though I felt I'd resolved the mess of emotions from all those years ago, it's only after speaking to him that I truly understand that the shame I carried all these years was entirely of my own making. I manufactured blame and guilt he didn't feel. I've realised that this ongoing discomfort has been a painful downside to something quite positive - the fact that I hold myself to a high moral standard, and that I have a compulsive inclination towards intensive introspection. I'm also finally seeing that left unchecked this tendency can be can be cruel and destructive, and that sometimes I need to be kinder to myself.
I think in a lot of ways I didn't give him enough credit for being able to figure out life after treatment on his own. I think I thought of myself as the only person capable of fixing him. That actually couldn't be further from the truth. He's happy and healthy, and still a genuinely wonderful human being. We've both grown up and moved on. I can honestly say both of us are better people for having been through it.
Now - finally - cancer really is just a thing that happened once.