healing through words

Every year, as my birthday approaches, a familiar restlessness begins to hum inside me. It starts quietly, an unease that sits somewhere behind my ribs, and then gathers strength, rising like a tide I cannot hold back. It is not really about getting older. It is about feeling like I should have done more by now, like time is running out and I am still not where I should be. It is the gnawing thought that I am wasting precious days, that I have failed to make enough of the life I have been given.

It is a strange mix of gratitude and dissatisfaction. On one hand, I know I have been given a second chance. Last year, two days before my birthday, I completed radiation for breast cancer. It was the final step in a long, gruelling treatment journey that included chemo, surgery and immunotherapy, and I remember the relief that came with hearing the words “you are done.”

I did not throw a party or go out for dinner. I spent the day quietly, alone, as I often do. Over the past few years, birthdays have become private rituals, days to stop and take stock of my life, to think about where I am, where I have been, and what comes next. But last year the reflection was different. I was not restless or anxious. I was not measuring my worth by what I had achieved. I was simply grateful to be alive. My skin still burned faintly from radiation, and my mind was tender, bruised from months of fear and fatigue. Yet beneath all that was a quiet gratitude. I had survived. That felt like enough.

This year feels different. The old anxiety has crept back in, like an uninvited guest slipping through a door I thought I had locked. The same thoughts circle in my head, what have you done with your life, why have you not achieved more, why are you still in the same job, the same routine.

I tell myself to stop, to breathe, to remember everything I have been through, but the restlessness does not listen. It whispers that I am wasting time, that I should be moving faster, doing more, becoming more.

Maybe it is because recovery is not as clean and simple as I hoped it would be. I thought that once treatment ended I would start feeling better, that I would rebuild myself piece by piece and soon feel like the old me again. Strong, determined, in control. But the truth is, I am still in recovery, still learning to inhabit this changed body and uncertain mind. My hair has not even grown back fully, my energy still flickers unpredictably. Some days I feel capable, almost normal. Other days I wake with a heaviness that settles before I have even started moving.

And yet, despite knowing all this, despite knowing that healing takes time, I still feel the pressure to be back to normal. To be achieving, contributing, pushing forward. It is as if my mind has not caught up with my body, still operating on the old settings of ambition and urgency. I know it is not helpful, this inner drive that borders on self-punishment, but it is hard to turn off. It feels like something I learned young, this belief that my worth depends on what I produce, what I accomplish, how efficiently I use my time.

Birthdays seem to magnify that belief. They are checkpoints, annual reckonings. They remind me that time is passing, that no matter how much I do it never feels like enough. Maybe what lies beneath the anxiety is fear, the fear that life will slip through my fingers before I have done what I was meant to do.

When I look back, though, I can see how unfair that judgement is. The things I have endured are not small. I faced cancer. I lost my hair, my energy and at times my sense of self. I had surgeries, complications, radiation and recovery, days when I could barely lift my head from the pillow. I learned what it means to live in uncertainty, to wake up not knowing if I would survive the year. And I did survive.

But survival is not the same as living. Once the appointments slow down, once the doctors say you are clear, the world assumes you will go back to normal. People see you looking better, your colour returning, and they think you are fine. Even I assumed that. I thought I could pick up where I left off, fill my days with plans and projects.

Instead, I find myself feeling unmoored. The urgency that cancer has pressed into me, this acute awareness that time is precious, is almost unbearable. It’s turned from motivation into anxiety. Every minute feels like something I should be making use of, transforming into meaning or achievement.

But when you try to live every moment as if it might be your last, you cannot really rest. You cannot breathe.

That is what I am realising now, as my next birthday looms closer. I have spent so much time rushing toward meaning that I have forgotten how to simply be. My body is still asking for gentleness, for patience, for quiet repair. But my mind, my restless and overachieving mind, keeps demanding more.

This year I want to do it differently. I want to honour the space I am in, this tender in-between of not quite sick, not quite well. I want to accept that recovery does not have a finish line. There is no done when it comes to rebuilding yourself after cancer. There is only the slow process of learning to live in a body and mind changed by trauma.

Maybe my birthday can be a day to remember that, not a measurement of how much I have achieved, but a moment to see how far I have come.

Because I have come far. I faced death and chose life. I peeled back the layers of fear and found resilience underneath. I began volunteering with the Cancer Council, trying to give back, trying to walk beside others who are facing the same terrifying unknowns. I started writing again, giving shape to the chaos so that maybe it can offer comfort or connection to someone else. These are not small things. They are quiet, but they are real.

And maybe that is the lesson this birthday is offering me. That growth does not always look like progress. That healing is not about milestones, but about learning to sit with yourself, even when you feel restless or afraid.

So when my birthday arrives, and that familiar ache stirs again, I will tell myself this.

You are not running out of time.
You are learning how to live in it.
You are still becoming who you are meant to be.
And that, right now, is enough.