My Cancer as a Sabbatical

Rarely in my life have I stopped working.

I don't mean stopped making art, or stopped showing up for my kids. I mean stopped the cycle. The survival cycle. Get up, go, do, produce, make enough, finish the project, do it, do it, do it. The one that never really asks if you're okay, only if you're keeping up.

Cancer stopped it.

Not gently, and not because I chose it. It was thrust on me, the way illness always is, uninvited and non-negotiable. But somewhere in the middle of the appointments and the scans and the waiting rooms, I started calling it something else. My sabbatical. Sometimes my retirement. My mini retirement, if I'm feeling playful about something that mostly hasn't felt playful at all.

I say it half-joking, but I mean it. Whatever brought me here, this is still time away from the cycle. And I have never, not once in my adult life, let myself have real time away from it.

I have never trusted that things would work out without me forcing them to. Cancer asked me to. There wasn't really a choice. I couldn't out-produce this. I couldn't push through it the way I've pushed through everything else. For the first time, I had to actually trust that when the time was right, and whatever I needed to heal was done, it would work out. Financially. Emotionally. Physically. All of it.

I'm not there yet, fully. But I'm closer than I've ever been.

This extended, intentional stepping away from work was supposed to be about healing. That part I expected. What I didn't expect was the side focus, the unintended one. My own internal wellness. The parts of me that had been running quietly in the background for years, unattended.

My sister. My love. My kids. My heart. My family.

When I finally exited the survival cycle, healing came looking for me. Not just the physical kind I was bracing for, the surgery and recovery kind. A different healing. The kind I didn't know I needed until I had the stillness to feel its absence.

I accepted care. I accepted love. Those two sentences look simple written down. They were not simple to live. Accepting care has never come easily to me. Neither has accepting love, not the kind that isn't earned or performed for, just given.

Having cancer turned out to be one of the biggest sources of healing in my life. I don't say that to make it smaller than it is. It has been scary. It has been sad. It has been unexpected in ways I still haven't fully processed and probably won't for a long time.

It has also been beautiful. Cathartic. Life giving.

I believe it opened my heart again, and I think the uninterrupted break from constant motion is what made space for that. You cannot hear your own heart over the sound of your own hustling. I couldn't, anyway. I had to be stopped before I could listen.

There is a version of me I am closing the door on. Not only because cancer demanded it, though it did in some ways, but because I don't want her back. The one who couldn't rest without guilt. Who treated slowness like failure. Who mistook constant doing for a personality.

There is also a version of me just beginning. Steadier. Calmer. More willing to let things unfold on their own time instead of forcing an outcome on my clock.

I don't know exactly what this next chapter looks like yet. For the first time, I'm not panicking about that unknown. I'm sitting in it. Trusting it.

That might be the real gift of this sabbatical. Not the clarity, though I have more of it now than I've had in years. Not even the calm, though I feel that too, more often than I expected to.

It's the trust. The quiet, hard-won belief that I don't have to make everything happen. That some things are allowed to simply happen to me, and through me, and for me. And that I will be okay either way.

If this resonated with you, I'd love for you to explore more of my story and my work at artoracleemily.com, or subscribe below to follow along as this next chapter unfolds.