When Cancer Broke My Spirit – The Atlantic

“MARIA MADE A LIST of things she would never do. She would never: walk through the Sands or Caesar’s alone after midnight. She would never: ball at a party, do S-M unless she wanted to, borrow furs from Abe Lipsey, deal. She would never: carry a Yorkshire in Beverly Hills.”

I came across Play It as It Lays in my high-school library when I was 16, and I cut two or possibly three classes to read it. God, I hated high school. I wanted to read, but they wanted me to sit at a desk and talk about “side, angle, side.” I found Joan Didion’s novel electric, bleak, ravishing. More than that: essential.

There I was, on the cusp of womanhood, of being a sexual creature—and in the nick of time, I had stumbled across this invaluable guidebook. In the girls’ magazines, all you ever read about was “boys who only wanted one thing” and how you should be grateful for strict parents, because imagine what would happen to you if they didn’t care enough to give you a curfew? But Play It as It Lays introduced me to what were obviously the real perils, the important ones that the adults were keeping from us. Bad, terrible, unspeakable things that I’d never even considered. Balling at parties! S-M! Yorkshire terriers!

I can remember whole passages from the book, but more than anything that series of she-would-nevers. Over the years, I have come up with my own list, ​​as square and tame as I am:

Caitlin would never call a boy unless he had called her first. She would never change into or out of a bathing suit in a communal dressing room. She would never watch Star Wars or any of its sequels, cut a dinner roll with a knife, become an alcoholic.

And, for the past 20 years, the list would include one extremely important never: Caitlin would never write in detail about the painful, unacceptable things that she has had to endure in two decades of cancer treatment.

At the time of my diagnosis, I was just beginning my career as a writer, and for some reason I thought no one would ever hire me if they knew I was sick. I was also superstitious, and felt that writing about the disease during a period of remission was tempting the gods. Plus there was the problem of sadists: Letting personal information like that out into the world gives cruel people a loaded gun.

Lately, though, …….

Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/12/cancer-teeth-loss/621103/