Owning it

John Everett Millais - The Woodsman's Daughter

I've been blogging here for 5 months now, which in and of itself is hard to believe.  I shared my writing with my husband the early on, and a few months later shared it with my daughter.  I've also shared it with other breast cancer patients, but it wasn't until last week that I (finally) shared it with family and friends.

I guess I was a little nervous.

I've written before about how when stage IV was finally official, it took me some time to feel up to sharing it with people.  That was part of it.

But also, what I write here is true to what's going on, but at times it's also deeply personal and not always that flattering.

Until I personally shared this blog with people who know me, I had the luxury of knowing that any criticism would stay with the blog and not spill out into the rest of my life.

I have no idea if everyone struggles so much with that or if it's just the combination of my particular nature and experience that made me skittish (ok, possibly combined with my striking inability to consistently remember that I've well and truly aged out of the K through 12 bracket and the powerlessness that that bracket entailed), but sharing the blog really didn't come easy.  I fully realize the fault is on me; I have a lot of good people in my life who really aren't the sort to tear me down, but putting what I think out there in black and white and then tying it back to myself was still a hard thing for me to do.

But a really funny thing happened when I did share my new diagnosis and the blog.

People were not only really warm and loving about the stage IV thing (which I sort of expected because I know awesome people) but also people actually wanted read the blog and said they liked it.

Crazy.

I thought it might be interesting to other people going through this in the same way I've found it helpful to read other people's experiences with cancer--sort of a shared "me too" combined with a dash of "how interesting, that's so different from how I feel"--but it never really occurred to me that people who don't have breast cancer would want to know what I was thinking about here in relation to cancer.

One of my brothers likened it to finding out there was a whole "cancer Kate" that no one knew about.  Not the same as not knowing I had cancer, of course, I'm not that secretive, but I guess I tend to take "Give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar" a bit too far sometimes.  I've been feeling like cancer thoughts need to stay in that cancer place and not spill out too far (at least not without an invitation) into the happy places that aren't cancer-related.

Turns out, some people wanted to be let in and some people were even interested but didn't want to pry.

It defiantly feels a bit weird being this open about everything and tying it back to my non-cancer life.  In the last week I've had a couple of conversations that had me thinking it felt so odd to have things brought up that I posted, like people were reading my mind (because, of course, in a pretty literal way, people were reading what was on my mind).  It's not a bad thing, just feels strange to me.

Now that I have shared the blog, I'm both relieved and glad.  And a little proud of myself for taking that risk.  I hope it doesn't become too much of whatever it is that will upset anyone, but I guess no one has to keep reading it who doesn't want to.

Thank you everyone who's read this blog, those who know me through this blog and those who knew me but maybe now know me a little more.  I'm grateful to have you here with me.