“Being in remission is all I’ve ever known. I was just a baby when I was diagnosed with stage 4S neuroblastoma in my adrenal gland and liver. There were surgeries and chemotherapy, but I was far too young to remember any of it. One of my earliest memories, though, is of being in kindergarten and missing school for my yearly check-up at SickKids, making sure the cancer hadn’t returned.
I just celebrated 20 years in remission, which is wild because I’m also just about to celebrate my 21st birthday. Cancer is still a big part of my life, and yet I’m not living with it in the same way as most other people in the cancer community.
This both-and-neither experience often made me feel like a bit of an outsider. By the time I was in my teens, though, I started to sense that the ways in which I was different were deeper than I’d realized. Slowly, I began to figure myself out, to embrace that difference and own it. This led to me coming out as non-binary at the age of 15. I didn’t offer any explanations. I just put it out there. My pronouns are they/them now. This is who I am.
For so long, my story had been about something beyond my control. And here I was, for the first time, taking the reins of my own narrative. It felt good. I was surprised at how much more at home I felt in the cancer community after coming out, and at how empowered I became as an advocate by telling my story authentically. The cancer community is a safe space to be different, and I’ve been able to take part in some excellent queer-specific advocacy and programming with Young Adult Cancer Canada.
Advocacy has been part of my story from the beginning. My parents were always strong advocates for me, and they stayed heavily involved in the childhood cancer world after I went into remission. I participated in a lot of events and fundraising as a child, but it always felt like something that was happening around me, not something that I was doing. It’s been powerful to rediscover myself as an advocate on my own terms. I’m excited to make meaning out my survivorship by giving back in ways that reflect the entirety of who I am.”
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