Final entry

May 29, 2008
Final Entry:

When I first started this project I was thrilled to have the opportunity to speak up about my personal experience with a universal topic. So many lives have been touched and altered by a cancer experience, whether it be personally or through a family member that I thought it would be great to possibly connect with someone or share my experience. I thought it would be easy to express how cancer has changed and influenced my life, while offering insight into my families experiences. Yet, I found this to be much harder than I had anticipated, I found that I don't necessarily feel one way in particular to cancer, and it has influenced my world in so many ways that it is difficult to state outright. I learned through the accumulation of images and my writings that I am sick as hell of talking about cancer. It is the biggest most influential thing that has happened to me, and while I can never escape it, I don't necessarily want to talk about it anymore. I have been talking about cancer for six years, SIX YEARS. I mean every class biography, every personal reflection, every time I have to explain to new friends or boyfriends why I don't have a dad, and I am so over it. Towards the beginning of the project I felt like I had a good amount of material, I could reflect on how cancer is always on my mind, I am angry, sad, a better person BLAH BLAH BLAH, I AM OVER IT. I guess the older I get the more I feel like I just want to move on, it will always be there, it will always be sad but that is life. I do not feel like I don't want to talk about it because it is necessarily hard but rather, I am just used to it now. I have come to terms with life's surprises and heartbreaks, and all I want to do is move on. This began to show in my work, and I feel like this project has served as the ignition to the ending my conversations about cancer. In this interview with my Mom we discuss how studies about cancer patients who live the rest of their lives in denial to ever having battled cancer have a much higher survival and remission rate. This idea is a perfect summation of my feelings about cancer, it latches to you, and slowly eats away at you...if you let it. If we are able to move on, brush the chip off our shoulder and live the rest of our lives like cancer didn't effect us, hopefully it wont anymore.