I’m Still Here

In December, when the doctors found something suspicious, people really leaned in. The word cancer rang out like a fire alarm, and suddenly, I was held in the trembling hands of collective concern. People watched, waited, braced themselves alongside me. When I posted photos from my latest hospital stay—electrodes pressed against my skin, the sterile tangle of wires snaking across my chest—my inbox filled, my social media lit up, voices clamoring to know if I was okay.

But six months ago, when I was strapped to a stretcher and rushed off to the exact same hospital in an ambulance, it was quiet. No flood of messages. No chorus of worry. That crisis did not warrant the same urgency, did not invite the same tender, anxious touch. It was the same body breaking down, the same hands trembling in my lap, but the fractures of the mind do not earn the same sympathy as the failures of the flesh. When your heart falters, they call it an emergency. When your mind does, they call it a shame.

I have lived in both landscapes, have known the weight of my own body betraying me in ways visible and invisible. There is an etiquette to suffering, an unwritten rulebook that deems which illnesses are worthy of concern and which are merely uncomfortable truths best left unspoken. I have been both the patient they rush to save and the one they quietly usher out of sight.

The body is a strange battlefield. The things that unravel inside it do not always leave visible wreckage, do not always demand immediate alarm. My own body has been a stage for countless performances of failure and resilience—a nervous system short-circuiting, a heart stammering against its own rhythm, a mind collapsing under the weight of itself. There is no hierarchy of suffering, yet the world insists on sorting pain into categories: acceptable, tragic, self-inflicted, inconvenient.

I think of the nights spent tethered to machines, my heart’s electric whispers recorded in jagged lines. I think of the other nights, the ones where the war was inside my skull, where no scan or test could confirm what I already knew—that something was breaking, something was wrong. I have sat in both waiting rooms, have seen the difference in how the world reacts to a body in crisis versus a mind in distress.

And yet, here I am. Still waking, still breathing, still stitching myself back together with art and language, with the hands that refuse to be idle. I have learned to find solace in the act of creation, to pour the unspeakable into pigment and paper. There is power in translating pain into something tangible, something that can be held up to the light and understood in ways the body never could be.

The world is uncomfortable with what it cannot see. We are taught to rally against cancer, to wage wars on failing organs, but we do not know how to hold space for the quiet, interior battles. We turn away from suffering that does not bleed, does not show itself in scars and statistics. And yet, pain is pain. It does not lessen because it is unseen.

So I write. I paint. I put the unspoken into something solid, something that cannot be ignored. And in this, I find gratitude—not for the suffering itself, but for the ability to shape it into something meaningful. For the hands that still create, for the breath that still fills my lungs. For the quiet understanding that even in the absence of validation, my pain is real. My survival is real.

There are still nights when the weight of it all presses down, when the body and mind conspire against me in ways I cannot control. But I wake. I stretch, feeling every vertebra, every ache, every place where the past has left its permanent mark. I press my fingers into paint, into words, and I remind myself: I am still here. And that, in itself, is enough.