Me

nomad-in-action

I am a 24 year old nomad, it seems.   I have been living out of a bag for almost two years now. (Though for the moment I have a job and a great place to live, I keep my t-shirts stuffed in my old hiking pack, as a reminder I won’t be here, doing this, forever.)  And I love it.  Without cancer in my life, that is how I would like to be known.  As a nomad, as a traveler, as an observer of far-away locales.

 I would never tell you most of the things I’ll write on this blog if we met in real life.  If I did tell you mom my was sick, it would be only the barest details.  I don’t like being defined by or pitied for this disease.   Perhaps this is a knee-jerk reaction to my passionate mother, who wears everything, included her diagnosis, on her sleeve.  I like to tuck some things away, to hold onto my secrets.  I guess here I can speak because I feel as though I’m talking to myself.

 Though my mom had already been diagnosed for a year, I finally chose to pursue my dream of volunteering in a developing country after graduation.  I spent my first post-college year in the Marshall Islands as an ESL teacher.  My other dreams include graduate school across the country, a summer in South America, and an eventual, long-term position overseas.  I hold these dreams like a fluttering bird in barely-closed palms.  Whose to say when, or if, they’ll ever fly?

I don’t want pity for writing these things (though it is a painfully tempting thing to ask for, at times).  I just know that even though I pretend I am the only one who can understand what its like to deal with this, I know that its not true.  Millions of others have grieved for family and friends with cancer.  Thousands of families know what its like to walk to the emotionaly tightrope of a loved-one’s terminal illness.  Maybe a few of them will read this post and realize its too lonly to pretend you’re the only one. 

But we’re not just the daughters of cancer.  Like our mothers, we are writers and travelers, horse-back riders, and surfers, poets, teachers, pranksters, and hikers.  And, come hell or high water, we’re our mothers’ daughters–strong, tenacious, and hopeful.   We’ve learned from them that we can chose to define ourselves by our responses to the hands life deals us, not the cards themselves.

Standing on the shoulders of Giants: Mom, me, and Matt on Ulien, Arno (the island in the RMI where I lived and taught in 2007/2008)