8 years of cancer, 8 years of Trump

On learning to live again

On election night this year, I had that familiar feeling — that anxious, buzzy feeling of dread mixed with hope mixed with the desire to just know. I kept reaching for my phone to check the NYTimes app, scroll Twitter, scroll Instagram, and check all my group texts, even if I knew I wasn’t going to get an answer, let alone the answer I was hoping for. I went to bed around 11 pm before the results were called with that frustrating and familiar sense of non-closure. And then, of course, in the morning came the feeling of profound disappointment, grief, anger, worry. 

Those of us who have had Very Bad Things happen know this cycle all too well. It’s the exact same way I feel before, during, and after every biopsy, scan, and surgery I’ve had over the last eight years. 

It’s reasonable to conclude that eight years ago, something went very off the rails for me, and I got trapped in the Bad Timeline (bad news if you’re reading this: you’re here too). In September 2016, I was diagnosed with breast cancer, even though I had no family history. I started chemo for the first time on October 25, 2016 (the day after Jake’s 28th birthday), and then exactly two weeks later, my white blood cells were rebounding, and I felt well enough to go to an election night party (remember when we did those?). We all know how the rest of that night went. 

It’s hard for me to remember exactly how I felt in September, October, and November of 2016, but I can confidently say it was akin to losing all grip on reality. A Trump victory felt like the end of the world as I knew it. And so did cancer. What did it mean to live in a country, and in a body, that was governed by fear and chaos? I couldn’t really regulate my nervous system. I lost the ability to imagine the future, an ability that I’ve never fully recovered. I felt completely betrayed by my own cells and my neighbors in a way that left the very ground I stood on feeling shaky — when would the other shoe drop? 

I hate cancer, but strangely (sickly? darkly?), I love cancer. I’ve lived with cancer for nearly a quarter of my life. It’s fundamentally shaped who I am and how I move through the world. Many people in my life — some of my very best and closest friends — don’t even know the pre-cancer Taylor. And, of course (I won’t even resist the cliché), cancer is a really good teacher. It teaches those of us affected by it how to live, even when all we feel we can manage to do is try to survive. Eight years ago, cancer rocked me to my very core, but now it feels sort of like an old friend — my own cells, gone berserk — that I’ve learned to live with. 

Trump, too, has shaped us and taught us how to move through the world. And with Trump, too, we must relearn to live. There are a lot of lessons from this election that those of us who consider ourselves progressives must learn. We have to become better at coalition-building with people we sometimes disagree with. We have to get better at packaging and selling our ideas. We can’t write off all Trump voters as racist misogynists — 1) it’s more complicated than that, and 2) we need at least some of them in order to win our country back. (I’ve spent my whole career working in deeply red, mostly rural America. Some of my greatest allies on really progressive issues — expanding funding for child care, removing checks on legal immigration status to get access to public benefits — have been Trump voters. We can, and must, find common ground.) And, perhaps most importantly, we have to remember how to live and find joy and take care of each other even when it feels like all we have the energy to do is try to survive.