Branded

Owning the word that owns you

AI-assisted image, edited by Mary Rose © 2026

Living inside what I survived

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The sun warmed my back the afternoon someone handed me a t-shirt and said to hurry and put it on. Silk-screened on the front, it read, survivor. They waved their arms and gathered us into a group, all of us in the same colored shirts, to take a picture. Everyone around me was giddy with pride. I choked back tears. A red-hot sting of anger I didn’t understand moved through me. Walking away later, I felt branded with a description I’d spent years refusing. It set me into another cycle of meaning-making.

I rejected the word survivor as soon as I escaped the abusive environment of my childhood. Surviving was only the first stop on my way out of the pain I lived. It was not my destination. In the support groups of my youth, I watched people grow so entrenched in survivor identity that it tethered them to victimhood. I wanted more than a compassionate label. I wanted to move past what kept so many people I knew in an endless loop of real and debilitating drama. I wanted a normal life. Paradoxically, getting there required extraordinary work to go beyond what most people survive.

Of course, there was therapy. Years and years of therapy. I also read books, attended seminars, tried every reasonable form of healing, and some unreasonable ones, too. I took three steps forward and two steps back more times than I can count. From each setback, I extracted what I could learn. I never gave up. Each time the fog cleared, I moved myself closer to a gratifying, functional life.

After far too much time in a soulless corporate job, I launched into the world of being my own boss, running my own company, making a difference in an evolving industry on my terms. I repaired the mistakes of my ill-equipped motherhood and made peace with what could not be changed. I fell in love and, for the first time, learned what a relationship built on honesty and mutual respect actually feels like.

The life I built did not bury my child abuse. It smoothed over the deep ruts etched into my mind, redirecting the course of my life despite the damage.

Slowly, I came to think of myself as a transcender.

Then cancer arrived.

I lashed myself to the mast and said, “Anchors aweigh.” Treatment took me to the threshold. I nearly crossed it twice. Death stood nearby, waiting for one wrong move. I wanted to trust-fall into the care of every provider I met. What I learned, flat on my back in an ICU bed with treatment orders drawn by doctors I never saw, was that trust and ceding my agency were not the same. One is faith. The other is disappearing. To survive, I needed to do what I had done all along. Question. Protect. Hang on.

Through it all, the coping skills I had learned as a child to survive life-threatening situations rose to meet the moment. I had been training for the pain and uncertainties my whole life. When cancer’s suffering surfaced, the skill that followed me out of childhood let me leave my body and wait it out. I knew how to release my hold and let myself be carried on the waves of what had to be endured.

Transcendence is possible when humans are the problem. But you cannot transcend biology gone wrong. Remission does not mean cure. It means reprieve.

Surviving is where I live now.

Living with incurable cancer feels like living in a dysfunctional house. You never know where the next blow is coming from. Things can be fine for a stretch, yet every fatiguing day, every symptom, every difficult procedure, every hour spent in scanxiety makes it impossible to fully exhale.

Good times in my childhood meant riding my bike into imagined adventures, playing with dolls to act out the normal life I desperately wanted, getting lost in books, and writing my own stories. All of it happened outside my mother’s reach, away from the sound of her voice.

I draw on that same spirit now. We begin or end medical appointments with a date. We dine out and sometimes splurge on a hotel room with a view worth waking up to. During the stem cell transplant, we lived in an apartment near the cancer center and claimed the mystique of city life, then let it go when we returned to the peace of our semi-rural home. We make space for pleasure while managing critical illness. The gladness I once took for granted is now something I reach for every day.

Transcendence is a permanent state of mind. Survivor is a revocable title. Relapse takes it away. You are a patient again. If you die, they utter the ultimate insult in loving tones. They say you lost the battle.

Good news is temporary. By the time the report arrives to say I have a clean scan and strong blood work, the next round of surveillance is already scheduled. I manage it. I live alongside this disease. I survive it.

I stand with a foot in each camp, transcender and survivor. If I let survivor be my only identity now, I lose the aspiration that built this life. I claim my place among my fellow myeloma survivors, even as I flinch a little at the word. Decades of eschewing the term, and here I am.

There are things you transcend. There are things you survive. Knowing when to do which is wisdom.

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If you’re looking for my myeloma story, told through the updates I share with friends and family as the treatment unfolds, visit the Myeloma tab on the website or click below for a chronological table of contents.

Myeloma Treatment - Table of Contents