The Myth of Getting Back to Normal

After cancer, people will tell you how lucky you are.
How grateful you must feel.
How good it must be to finally get “back to normal.”

And you smile, because that’s what’s expected. You nod politely, maybe even agree out loud — but inside, you feel the ache of a truth no one else seems to understand: there is no going back.

Because normal, as you once knew it, no longer exists.

When you’ve walked through cancer — through the appointments, the scans, the fear, the loss — you come out the other side fundamentally changed. It’s not just that your body feels different, or that your life looks different. It’s that you are different.

And that difference can be hard to explain. It’s not simply about physical recovery or healing scars. It’s about the quiet but irreversible ways the experience rearranges who you are.

Before cancer, you lived with a kind of innocence — a trust that your body would behave, that life would follow its expected rhythm. After cancer, that innocence is gone. You know now how fragile things are. You’ve seen how quickly the ground can disappear beneath you.

And yet the world still expects you to bounce back — to slip into your old routines, your old roles, your old self.

But you can’t. Because that self no longer fits.

I remember the first time someone told me how great it must feel to be “back to normal.”
I nodded, smiled, and changed the subject. But the truth was, I didn’t even know what normal meant anymore.

How do you go back to normal when the life you had before cancer no longer exists? When you’re left picking up the pieces of who you used to be, trying to figure out what still fits and what never will again?

For me, that meant trying to restart a career that no longer felt aligned. It meant learning how to parent my children while living with constant fatigue and uncertainty. It meant navigating a world that wanted me to move on while I was still reeling inside.

Normal was gone. And in its place was something unfamiliar — quieter, slower, more intentional, but also lonelier.

This is what no one tells you: healing isn’t about returning. It’s about rebuilding.

There’s no finish line where you reclaim the life you had. There’s only the life that comes next — the one shaped by what you’ve survived.

That’s not a tragedy. It’s transformation.

But transformation is messy. It’s disorienting. And in the early stages, it can feel like loss.

When you stop chasing your old life, it can feel like letting go of who you were. But what you’re really doing is making space for who you’re becoming.

And here’s something I learned the hard way: why would you want to go back to the self that existed in the same conditions that allowed disease to thrive? The version of you that was overextended, overstressed, undernourished, or disconnected from what truly mattered?

You can’t heal with the same mindset, the same pace, the same chemistry of life that once made you sick. The old self was never meant to survive this. It was meant to evolve.

After my third relapse, I stopped trying to go back. I realised that the old version of me — the one who defined success by how much he could carry, how much he could achieve, how much he could control — didn’t survive the fire. And maybe he wasn’t meant to.

Cancer stripped away everything that wasn’t essential. It dismantled my life, my marriage, my career, my identity. And in that devastation, something unexpected emerged: truth.

Truth about what actually matters. Truth about who I am when there’s nothing left to prove. Truth about what kind of life I want to live — one that’s simpler, more connected, more real.

That’s not getting back to normal. That’s creating something new.

So many people come to me saying, “I just want to feel like myself again.”
And I get it. I really do.

But the self you’re looking for doesn’t live in the past.
It lives in the version of you that’s rising right now — the one shaped by everything you’ve learned, lost, and endured.

Normal is a myth. It’s a way of trying to tame the wildness of transformation, to make sense of something that can’t be undone.

But maybe the point isn’t to go back to how things were.
Maybe the point is to honour what the journey has made you.

If you’re standing in that in-between place — where the world expects you to have moved on but you’re still trying to find your footing — I want you to know this: you’re not behind. You’re rebuilding.

Healing doesn’t mean returning to who you were. It means expanding into someone new.

And while that process can feel uncertain, it’s also sacred. Because what you’re building now — this life after — will carry more truth, more presence, and more meaning than the one that came before it.

So no, you won’t get back to normal.
But you’ll get somewhere better.
Somewhere more real.
Somewhere that fits who you’ve become.

If you’re finding yourself in that space between who you were and who you’re becoming — unsure how to trust, how to rebuild, how to move forward — that’s the work I do with patients every day.

As both a survivor and a psychotherapist, I help people navigate the tender terrain of transformation — to make sense of what’s been lost, to integrate what’s been learned, and to create a life that feels whole again.

If you’re ready to begin that process, I invite you to connect with me.
Because sometimes the most important healing doesn’t come from going back — it comes from finally stepping into the life that’s waiting on the other side.