October Is Not My Month

It’s October, which means, sigh, it’s Breast Cancer Awareness Month (BCAM) once again. “But Jamie, you’re a breast cancer survivor. Shouldn’t October be, like… your month?”

What, like I’m really going to spend a month celebrating the disease that almost killed me like it’s my birthday or my wedding anniversary? Would you? Would anyone?

What I find myself musing (okay fine, seething) about this October are other so-called survivors of trauma and their lack of a special color themed month. Because that’s what life is made of—trauma. We’ve all got it in our past, present, or future, whether we like it or not. Yet you don’t see anyone trying to make hot and dry as hell June “National Survivors of House Fires Month,” or gloomy, frigid January “National Seasonal Depression Survivors Month.”

I mean, to what end do we acknowledge our various trials and tribulations? Is 2027 going to be the International Prostate Cancer Awareness Year? Is there going to be a Cystic Fibrosis Summer Solstice? A Biannual Shingles Fall Festival? And for those who don’t have a whole painstaking month of pink ribbons on every post in their feed, every billboard on 71 North—and yes, I know I’m a hypocrite. I was, in fact, on a billboard this month for BCAM. What, like I’m gonna turn down being on a billboard? I’m not a saint; I’m a survivor, remember? (Har har.)

But here’s the thing about the billboard, the ribbons, the “Warrior” hashtags, and the pinkwashing of everything from yogurt lids to NFL cleats: it’s easier to sell a color than it is to sit with a person.

We’ve turned cancer into a brand. And like any good brand, it needs a mascot. It needs a smiling face in a pink headwrap, holding a balloon, ringing a bell. It needs Joseph Campbell’s trademark narrative arc—diagnosis, battle, and victory. It needs survivors.

But what about the rest of us?

What about the ones who are “surviving”? The ones whose scans are clear but whose brains are a minefield of anxiety and PTSD? What about the metastatic community, who are living with cancer as a chronic, terminal illness, not a past-tense triumph? How do we brand BCAM to be palatable for them and the rest of the non-breast-cancer-having world? If we somehow found a way, would it really even be about them anymore?

That’s the problem with turning trauma into an awareness campaign. It flattens it. It makes it palatable for the masses. It asks the survivor to perform joy, to be grateful, to be a symbol. And when the story gets too messy—too terminal, too depressed, too angry, too real—the camera cuts away. The ribbon doesn’t know what to do with a woman who is still here but still grieving. It doesn’t know what to do with a body that betrayed her, or a mind that still checks every ache for the beginning of the end.

But I don’t want to be a symbol. I want to be a person. A person who is still angry. A person who is still grieving the body and the innocence I lost. A person who is tired of pink.

So, to answer your question: No. October is not “my” month. It’s the month the world decided to put a bow on my trauma and call it a celebration. And I’m still trying to figure out how to live in a body that betrayed me, in a culture that wants me to smile about it.

I don’t have a ribbon for that. I don’t want one.

I just want to be real. And maybe that’s the most radical thing a survivor can be.