#ladymac111

Oh my.

I’m really thrilled to be part of your recovery process, and knowing this might finally FINALLY put an end to my deeply conflicted feelings about having posted that fic in the first place. Not about having written it: it was extremely cathartic to write, which was the whole point, and I wrote it for a friend going into radio isolation, which I would do again in a second. I don’t regret writing it, but having posted it has always made a bit uncomfortable.

I don’t like how people write about cancer. I don’t like that people use it to wring feelings out of readers, I think it hurts us, cancer survivors, more than anyone, and so it makes me angry. Cancer as a useful fictional trope to make people scared or sad, or as a signpost for death, makes the diagnosis so much more terrifying when you get one. Oh, now I’m the cancer patient, we all know what happens next! It’s lazy writing and it makes me mad. If you want pathos in your story, get off your ass and construct some out of your plot and character, don’t just lean on a scary illness to do the work for you. You’re making that illness scarier. Bah!

Considering my strong feelings on the subject, posting a story about cancer was probably ill-advised. To be honest with you I wrote it and posted it an overmedicated euphoria when I only needed to sleep every other day (hooray for thyroid hormones), so my judgment was a tiny bit impaired. I have felt funny about it every day since my meds got readjusted.

Be careful, it’s snowing.

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