Puking Pink: My Adversity to Breast Cancer “Awareness” Campaigns

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I’ll tell you the truth : I love October, but I hate breast cancer awareness month.
Please hear me out, because I’m the daughter of a breast cancer survivor.
To make a very long and painful story extremely short, my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer 13 years ago. She had a mastectomy, chemo, and went into remission. Five years later, she was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer – breast cancer that had moved to other parts of her body. First, it was a tumor that had wrapped itself around one of her lower vertebrae. Then, it was her femur, her humerus, her ribs. She had radiation treatments. She found a cancer treatment center to go to where the doctors could give her more holistic treatment options. She started taking vitamins and eating better and pursuing clinical trial treatments that might help her. In 2008, we found out that it spread to her liver. She still kept moving forward, finding more ways to treat her illness. Her list of treatments and counter-treatments is a million miles long.
Eight years after her second diagnosis, here she is. And here I am. We’ve learned a lot about what’s important to us, and we’ve learned that we are blessed beyond our wildest understandings. But that’s not to say that the heartache of living with cancer isn’t abundantly, painfully real to us.
We pray that someone finds a cure to this disease. We pray that others find the strength and the faith to battle their own diagnoses and that they can learn to advocate for themselves. We pray that people learn to pay attention to their own bodies, their own health histories, their own well-being.
However, I just cannot stomach the pink-ribboned, horrifically over-sexualized, over-commercialized breast cancer “awareness” campaigns that have come out in recent years. Whether it’s buying a bag of chips with a pink ribbon on it, sporting a “Feel Your Boobies” t-shirt, or posting a vague and suspiciously sexual statement in a Facebook status, it has all become an easy target for manufacturers and commercial advertisers to target their most vulnerable and influential demographic: women.
Should we be donating to a good cause and raising awareness? Yes. But at what cost?
Even the products that sport the pink ribbon have been known to contain harmful cancer-causing chemicals. And there are other campaigns meant to “raise awareness” that raise questions about their moral and ethical treatment of women.
So the question becomes: are these companies milking the breast cancer issue and are you willing to continue buying into their exploitation?
Because here’s the thing: raising awareness and finding a cure breast cancer is a good cause. But not all campaigns “for a good cause” are good for us.

The Elusive Age.

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I wish I knew what this thought meant, but I have no way to articulate it, except to repeat it over and over again. I want something new. Am I thinking clothes? Or house decor? Or a new design for my blog? Or a new haircut? Or… (_fill in the blank?_) No, it’s deeper than material things. I wish I knew what it meant. And why.

Perhaps it’s an emerging pattern of nostalgia. Every year at this time I remember that I spent a Fall in Europe wandering and reading and writing and learning to my heart’s content. You can take the phrase ‘travel bug’ literally. It’s an itch that must be scratched and when you don’t it gnaws away at your thoughts, convincing you that if you could just go someplace new, everything would be better.

But am I now incapable of being happy where I am? I am happy. I have a wonderful husband and a good job doing something I actually like, and I have a great group of friends and family. I just have this restless feeling. Like I’m waiting on an elusive “new”, an elusive “better,” an elusive “different”, and I don’t know when or where or how I may find it.

A lot of people my age feel this way. A lot of people who were once my age felt this way, and they either did something great or resigned themselves to the waiting and the wanting. How will I deal with it? How will my friends deal with it? Our days aren’t meant for biding our time or waiting for something to come to us. We’re meant to reach out and grab hold of what we want. But what if we don’t know what that is? How do we find out what it is? What is the “great” that we might do? I’ve just asked a lot of big questions, many of which may not be answerable. It’s better than not asking, though. It’s better than not contemplating what it is we’re doing. I found this quote the other day, and I really hope that I can find a way to live up to it, and that my peers do, too. I have a feeling that this is what we want, and what we are most afraid of.

“What we are is God’s gift to us. What we become is our gift to God.” -Eleanor Powell

Restless Writer.

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Today is my ritual Writing Saturday. I’m at Starbucks, all by my writing self and a goooood cup of coffee. And I’m enjoying it… sort of. I have a lot of thoughts rolling around and none of them are very helpful. After a long, busy, roller-coaster week, I have nothing to show for it – at least not in terms of my writing.

Last Saturday I felt the same way. I wrote a solid 1,500 words, but none of what I wrote is anything that I would inflict on others. Now I sit, coffee in hand, listening to the friendly but distracting sounds of the cafe and I question, Did I come here this morning for the coffee or the writing? I might have just pulled myself into a bad writing habit by coming here instead of sitting at home in the quiet.

I know that’s not the only thing bothering me, though. I feel stumped. Uninspired. Frustrated. Displaced. Like something I once had is now gone; I feel the void, but what is it exactly that I’ve lost? I’m just wondering, for you writers and bloggers out there,

When you feel like something is missing in your writing, how do you find it? I have a feeling that many of you will say, “I keep writing.”

Thank you. That was very helpful. But how do you subdue the anxiety that accompanies the sense of aimlessness?

Truth be told, I feel bored with my writing self. Possibly, I am bored with my self self, and it’s infringing on my writing self. (Am I helping or hurting my writing by separating my writing self from my whole self?) When I become restless with my writing, it often feels like I’m talking my writing self down from the ledge. Don’t be so over-dramatic. The thing you’re missing? It will come back to you. Just be patient. Wait it out. Write it out. And then, my self-self gets frustrated. I am talking to myself. I am insane. I’m the crazy writer girl that’s going to start wearing all white and never leave my house. Or I’ll wind up sticking rocks in my trench coat pockets and wander into the river. Or stick my head in an oven and inhale deeply until the unhelpful thoughts go away…. See what I mean? It would be great if I could actually be satisfied with my writing self before the end of my life. (Disclaimer: I’m not actually suicidal. I just find it sad and amusing that so many great writers never recognized their giftedness.)

I know I’m not alone in this, so tell me, how do I talk my writing self back from the ledge? How do I break the cycle of unhelpful thoughts? Advice, please. For now, I’m going to keep working on an unfinished writing project from a few weeks ago and hope that it yields something reader-worthy….