#firefly project

I don’t remember if I have written here about the Firefly Project. It is run by the head of Art for Recovery at UCSF, and it is a really cool idea: match high schoolers and med students with cancer/life-threatening disease patients, and coordinate a year of pen-pal correspondence, with an in-person meet-up only after a number of letter exchanges. I signed up last year, feeling less-than-confident that I would be alive for the whole cycle. But I survived, and I got two med student pen-pals out of the process.

My two pen-pals were very different from one another, or at least our letters went in very different directions, but in both cases I was able to express myself in a way that was satisfying and therapeutic, and I got to know a couple of interesting people who were very much my peers, separated only by medical luck of the draw.

So I signed up again this year, and last week I got my first letters from my new pen-pals, again a pair of second-year med students about my age. Replying should be simple enough, introducing myself and whatnot. Yet for some reason, I am feeling terrified of replying. Perhaps it is because their first letters were pleasant but not too revelatory, so I am afraid of clobbering them with my “tale of woe.” Or I have told my cancer story so many times that I’m all burnt out.