Months ago, through tears pouring out my eyes, I cobbled together a sticky note on my computer, trying to express what I was feeling. I’m disappointed that I accidentally deleted it, but the first sentence still stays with me. “It’s easy for me to share the easy, fun things my life across social media and this blog, but the dark truth that I keep hidden away from everyone is that my mom has breast cancer.”

Thanks to our fantastic healthcare system, this secret didn’t stay so for long. I had to open up to the public, including friends, family, and those I barely know to not only share that my mom had cancer but that she needed help as well in the form of a GoFundMe.

Feelings are a funny and fickle thing. All the moments when I expected to break down the most were when I remained completely neutral. It wasn’t until I saw a $20 donation from a camp counselor that I worked with one summer during college that I started bawling. Because who was I to that person to donate? Why were my story and my mom so special to them?

To this day, I don’t have an answer for that, but I do have the hundreds of people who reached out through messages, DMs, donations, phone calls, and shares of my fundraiser. I have the connection of those who have lost family members, friends, other loved ones entirely or a piece of them to breast cancer. I have the chemo stories, the mastectomy scars, recovery advice, and the ten years cancer-free. I have so much more than I was ever looking to receive.

I told myself that during everything, I should write. I should take notes. I should remember how this feels. So I did jot down thoughts here and there, but it wasn’t easy to express what I was going through. I hardly wanted to speak about it for fear of breaking down and burdening someone else. But, I also knew that I had to stay strong for my mom, who was going through an unimaginable time.

I stayed numb, and I didn’t process anything. I don’t think my mom did either. How could I allow myself to feel anything? Even a trickle of weakness in the shell that I created would welcome a flood of emotions that I was unprepared to deal with.

I want to talk and write about it, so this is a start for now. There have been many trips, experiences, and things over the past months that I’ve wanted to share in this space. But with the shadow of cancer looming over me, I couldn’t do it. I know that this is a public forum, and anyone can read these thoughts, but it’s also somewhat of a diary for me, since to no one’s surprise, I’m not consistent about keeping a physical one.