Living in the Shadow

Illness is hard,

but what makes it hard today isn’t the illness itself.

We live in a time where medicine jumps forward every year.

Treatments exist now that would’ve been miracles a decade ago.

By all accounts, I should’ve died twenty times over already —

yet here I am.

A cockroach in the drywall.

Unkillable.

Uninvited.

And somehow still here.

That’s what living with cancer feels like.

It’s not death breathing down your neck —

it’s life circling the drain in slow motion.

Your days become a rhythm:

appointments, treatments, recoveries, collapses.

Feeling like shit, feeling better, feeling like shit again.

Back in shape just long enough to fall out of it.

Trying to work.

Trying to be a father.

Trying to be a partner.

Trying to pretend you’re still the person you were before the shadow arrived.

But everything is different now.

And once the shadow shows up,

it never leaves.

You plan birthdays around bloodwork.

Holidays around chemo.

Graduations around scans.

You try to put your disease down for a day —

just one —

so your family can breathe without carrying you on their backs.

And your manhood?

Nothing strips it faster than an illness you can’t fight.

How do you protect, provide, and lead

when climbing a flight of stairs feels like a summit attempt?

You rely on people.

You depend on them.

And every act of kindness becomes another debt you feel obligated to repay.

So you spend all your good days

trying to make up for the bad ones.

Trying to prove you’re still useful, still strong, still worthy.

Because you know the clock is ticking.

And it’s not ticking quietly.

People look at how you work, how you move, how fast you operate,

and they call it mania.

But it’s not mania.

It’s the clock.

When you’ve lived close to death,

you stop pretending you have time.

You stop waiting.

You stop dragging your feet

so other people don’t feel rushed.

You move.

You build.

You break things so you can rebuild them better.

Because every project might be the last one you finish.

People who still think they have decades ahead of them?

They’re your enemies — not in spirit,

but in pace.

They waste time.

They get lost in nonsense.

They drown in drama.

They create importance where there is none

and miss the importance that’s right in front of them.

But how could they know?

They think they still have time.

They haven’t lived under the shadow.

They haven’t heard the clock.

You have.

You’ve stared at ceilings at 3 a.m. waiting for results.

You’ve had conversations with yourself you’d never admit to anyone.

You’ve tried to plan a future

with an expiration date stamped somewhere you can’t see.

And once you’ve lived inside that countdown,

you can’t go back to pretending.

My father says,

“Time is an illusion.”

Fourth-grade education,

big hands, simple wisdom —

but somehow he sees the world clearer than most.

He reminds me every chance he gets

that we’re the ones who make things important

when they were never important.

We pour meaning into nonsense

and ignore the things that actually matter.

We act like tomorrow wants us.

Like we’ve been promised anything.

But if illness teaches you one thing,

it’s this:

Nothing is guaranteed.

Most things are bullshit.

Drama is cheap.

And time —

real time —

is the most fragile thing you’ll ever hold.

So no.

It’s not mania.

It’s urgency.

Clarity.

A refusal to waste the only thing

you can never get back.

Fact check me.