Erin Hazelton was living the kind of life many fashion insiders chase; then a diagnosis of breast cancer interrupted its course, creating in her the spirit of a champion.
There is not much you can control once you are diagnosed with cancer. You are told what your situation is, how your doctors plan to tackle it, then you are sent home numb, a stack of papers about side effects under your arm. You are told there are certain things you must let go of, control being the main one.
For me, a healthy, fit, organic-eating mother of two young children who’d just spent the past two years of her life navigating graduate school, getting cancer was unacceptable. I, quite literally, could not accept it. Breast cancer struck people’s grandmothers, not people like me. I was one of those annoying women who didn’t eat refined sugar, who bragged about the eleven-mile run she did over the weekend, who nursed her kids for longer than you did, who drank her tequila with lime, no agave. And I’m the one who gets diagnosed with breast cancer? I don’t think so.
For about two months after my diagnosis I waited for the phone to ring with the news that my biopsy had been misread. That samples had been confused at the lab and I was fine. Even after my hair started falling out from chemotherapy, I still thought that call might come.
Then, one day, it hit me: I had cancer and I had to deal with it. Not just show up to the hospital and be treated, but that I had to actively adjust my mindset and cope. I had to tell people. I had to let them know that this was what I was going through, and it was awful. I knew I needed some kind of pole if I was going to vault myself over this bar that had been set so high above me. I needed support.
Getting cancer is isolating. Especially when you don’t have any friends, or family members, who have been through it. You feel that no one you know can truly empathize, that they just feel sorry for you. And who wants to be the object of sympathy? Certainly not someone who runs eleven miles on the weekend.
The first thing I needed people to understand was that getting cancer doesn’t make you weak, it gives you strength. The will to fight for your life is intrinsic. When your energy is robbed by chemotherapy, by surgery, by radiation, a different kind of power emerges from depths you never knew you contained. When you look at your children’s faces and realize there’s a possibility you may not see them into adulthood, barriers that used to hold things back are broken and everything starts to flow. Uncontrolled. Exactly how it was meant to.
Letting go is the only way to cope with cancer. But that doesn’t mean you just lie there and let cancer happen to you. Let it activate you. Allow your friends to support you in ways you don’t think you need them to. Get out of bed when it feels like a horrible idea, and walk. Eventually you will run.
If you learn to release, you just might find yourself soaring right up over a bar that, not too long before, seemed impossible to clear.
