How Are You? (And Other Impossible Questions in Life After Cancer)

A friend I hadn't spoken to in months asked me tonight, “How are you?”

I gave the standard answer — I’m good. Job hunting. Market’s rough. It’s the holidays, so I’m taking a breather. But honestly? I’m bored. I’ve done 17 loads of laundry today. Organized the charging cables. And walked in circles around my kitchen. 

Every part of that answer was wrong. Not dishonest — just too small for the truth. And it kept me up all night.

“How are you?” suddenly felt like a loaded question with no safe, tidy answer. I defaulted to work because that’s where my identity has lived for decades. It’s what I clung to during treatment — a lifeline that made me feel normal when nothing else did. And even though I left my job a couple of months ago to focus on healing, I’ve been struggling to figure out who I am without that identity badge.

It’s easy to say I’m a mom, a wife, a friend — all true, all meaningful enough. But they don’t answer the deeper question I keep circling: who am I when everything goes quiet?

Work gave me structure, and treatment gave me structure — two very different routines, but both held me together. And now that neither is there, even with motherhood still woven through my days, I’m staring at the quiet and trying to figure out who I am without the scaffolding.

It feels like an existential question I should already know the answer to. Most people get one life. I feel like I’m in the bonus round. And a bonus round should be lived boldly… not filled with busywork or self-doubt. So why is my default answer still about work? Who am I trying to answer to? Who’s keeping score?

“How are you?” is supposed to be simple; a gentle check-in. But after cancer, it feels too small for everything underneath it. And I never know whether the person asking wants the polite version or the truth.

There’s a quiet assumption that I’m “better” now — chemo done, surgery done, more chemo done, immuno done. Back to normal, right? Back on track. Life is good.

And life is good. But survivorship is not a finish line — it’s the weird, messy middle. This is the part of life after cancer no one prepares you for — the strange, unstructured middle where you’re not sick, but not ‘back to normal’ either.”

Treatment gives you a timeline. A regimen. A team. When it ends, you become your own support staff:

• the doctor, diagnosing what you need each day as you manage lingering side effects

• the caregiver, delivering the emotional and physical care when those around you have moved on

• the therapist, parsing feelings and trying to make sense of them

You’re managing your own recovery on your own terms — and trying not to grade yourself on it.

There’s a misconception that once cancer is “gone,” you’re done. But survivorship is where you start picking through the wreckage, sorting through the last year and more, trying to understand what happened and what comes next.

And then there’s the pressure — subtle but there — to do something meaningful with this bonus life. You survived. You’re here. Do something. But what?

So I lay awake replaying my too-small answer to “How are you?” and spiraling into all these thoughts. Somewhere between midnight and dawn, after catching up on my usual shows and failing to fall asleep, Netflix cued up a cancer documentary — because of course it did.

I grew these zinnias over the summer. (That in itself is a miracle.) The butterfly showed up one morning and just stayed for a while, and so did I — a reminder of the transformation happening in these quiet moments.

Usually, I avoid cancer movies. They hit too close, and they almost always end in death. It’s like watching a version of your own life you didn’t ask to see. But that night, I watched.

Part of me thought maybe seeing my own life reflected back at me would finally make me cry. I’ve felt numb for weeks, like the emotions are stuck somewhere I can’t reach. I think I subconsciously hoped the movie would give me permission to fall apart.

The film followed Andrea Gibson’s final months with ovarian cancer. Their words, their fear, their humor — all of it so familiar it felt like déjà vu, even though my story’s ending is still being written. I found myself watching the film and reading four years of Andrea's Substack at the same time, trying to take in every corner of their experience at once. And watching her partner, Megan, care for them, hold them together, and then begin rediscovering herself afterward echoed pieces of my husband's experience too. Different circumstances, but the same kind of quiet, heavy love.

So much of what they described mirrored mine: the chemo haze, the bloodwork readouts, the post-infusion emotional whiplash, the anxiety and grief braided with joy, the fear of leaving people behind. And in Megan’s pain, I saw the shadow side of my own story — the part my husband carried quietly beside me.

It wasn’t pity. It wasn’t self-indulgence. It was recognition — and it was the first real emotion I’d felt in weeks. (Then I cried and finally took a nap.)

And maybe that’s the real answer to “How are you?”I’m here. I’m trying. I’m sorting through it. I’m in the bonus round — learning slowly, awkwardly, honestly — how to live again.