At the risk of overanalysing everything and concluding nothing, here’s a thing. When I first got diagnosed with cancer, I really surprised myself.  I would have guessed that the whole ‘putting everything into perspective’ effect would have meant that I suddenly realised there was a whole load of stuff I wanted to do – like a bucket list. Or that I’d feel as if I was treading water in a job / place / some other aspect of my life which, with everything suddenly thrown into sharp contrast, I would immediately want to change. What actually happened, though, was that I had a bit of a look at my life, and just really hoped it wouldn’t have to change. There wasn’t anything I wasn’t doing that I wished I was, and there wasn’t really anything I wanted to stop either. I just wanted the chance to carry on. To get back to normal. 

That’s something people say all the time. ‘You must be so glad to be getting back to normal’. Or, ‘I bet you can’t wait till you can just get back to normal and put all this behind you.’ And, more recently, now I can boast a small amount of even scalp coverage, ‘it’s so good to see that you’re better now and looking normal again’.

Obviously people mean all that in a good way. They want to see the bad stuff all packaged away and done with – who doesn’t? They want that for me as well as themselves. Most of the time I’m right there with them. Cheering myself on from the sidelines, ticking off each stage of treatment on the way to The Big Finish. Except there isn’t really a finish.

Here’s what I think. There is no normal. At least, maybe there is, but it’s a new normal. It’s not one I can go back to. I might look as if I’ve gone back to doing the same things, living and working in the same place, spending time with the same people… you get the idea. But I’m not the same person doing those things. It’s not like I started off being ‘me who doesn’t have cancer’, then for a bit I was ‘me who does have cancer’, and now I’m ‘me who doesn’t have cancer’ again. Now I’m ‘me who had, and is still having, treatment for cancer. Which has so far been successful. But which will now always be a part of who I am, and what I do.’

And that’s no bad thing. Ok, so maybe I’m disappointingly boring. Maybe my horizons are narrow and my aspirations low. Or maybe I was lucky enough already to have found the people and things that are important to me, and I don’t want to let those go. It doesn’t matter. Things felt right before, so I carried on. I guess if something still feels right and I can, I’ll carry on. If it feels wrong, I’ll try to change it. Which is probably exactly the approach I applied before, just without quite so much navel gazing. A symptom of having too much time on my hands. 

A lot of the stuff that fills my days isn’t the weighty, meaningful stuff I thought I’d spend my time on if something as big as cancer came along. Surprisingly, I don’t divide my days between rigorous self-examination, pondering the meaning of life, and fundraising for countless worthy causes. I spend a bit of time feeling guilty for worrying about trivial things, and the rest of my time worrying about trivial things. I know appearance isn’t important in the context of ‘am I going to die?’, but I’m not dead, so I do still want to be slim, toned, with a golden glow and sparkly nails. (None of which is reflected in the current state of affairs, by the way). I am still bothered about work, and how much there is to do, and whether others are doing a good job… but I might occasionally decide not to be the one who stays till it’s all done or takes it home for the weekend now. But then again I might. Because as great as a bit of perspective is, and it certainly has its uses, being comfortable with still caring about the stuff-that-doesn’t-matter-in-the-grand-scheme-of-things is actually really important. It’s all that stuff that makes up normal life. And one way or another, maybe that is me ‘getting back to normal’.