The Me In My Breast Cancer

Marlene Ellis

Over the last few years, I’ve read endless books, articles, studies, and reports about this awful disease of breast cancer, especially concerning Black women. I’ve been unable to tear myself away from wanting to know more since my diagnosis. I want to play my part in paying forward the benefits of my recovery. That’s my promise to the ancestors.  

Breast cancer has highlighted new levels of silence and secrecy I didn’t know existed. Breast cancer has revealed how bodily mutilations can render us silent, with reluctance to talk beyond the superficial. Breast cancer confines our negative feelings to the private while strength and resilience remain on show to the public. The ironic and masculine focus on women fighting breast cancer ‘to beat this war’ seemingly ignores a fundamental woman’s approach to this primarily women-centred disease. Breast cancer forces us to confront our sense of mortality. That I feared dying without dignity more than death itself was a revelation. But then, I wasn’t a mother raising children. Breast cancer has us pretend nothing has really changed, even when every woman who has undergone either surgery, chemotherapy or radiation, a couple of them, or all, knows we are permanently changed in ways we will barely know how to discuss with each other.

I’ve gone from zero to a deeper understanding of my experience and a little more. I’m annoyed with the cancer industry and its corporate focus on detection instead of the health priority in prevention. In contrast, I’m inspired by the range of women who have told their stories. Indeed, despite different circumstances, across centuries, generations, classes, nationalities, cultures and races, I have seen myself in their lives. Through their courage, I feed mine too.

Five years have passed since my breast cancer treatment, and of late, I’ve wondered about many things, including why I couldn’t say much about it personally beyond the shock of my hair falling out and the business of oestrogen. I’ll deal with my oestrogen story in a separate article.

I imagined I was one of those ‘when is she finally going to finish’ PhD students when I was diagnosed. I had submitted my thesis, but I was yet to have my viva, that’s the verbal defence of my research. My supervisor, Rosalyn George, helped me change dates, both of us knowing the effects of chemo as accumulative. It was no easy feat, but my viva was brought forward to help me. I had it after my second chemo session though I was scared I had messed up that vital last stage after going down with flu-like symptoms in the days running up to it. Exhausted though I was, I hadn’t consciously accepted these were the side effects of chemo.

Still, my viva went exceptionally well. The world stopped still, or so it seemed, and for the first time since starting my work, someone could test me on my entire research. Rather than the Spanish Inquisition, I feared, all that crammed work was suddenly given an outlet. It was a wonderful relief and an honourable experience. Those considered questions injected a new level of self-respect in me. In those moments, I became somebody new. I grew. I suppose I could call it the ‘nearly doctor’ stage.  I liked how I sounded and felt relaxed and clear. Subconsciously or otherwise, I must’ve conserved and channelled every bit of energy into those intense couple of hours because not for a moment did I feel unwell. On the contrary, I felt vibrant, alive, almost weightless. It’s a memory that has not diminished. Afterwards, I went home straight to bed, exhausted and discovered days later that I was losing my beautiful locs. With more chemo sessions to face, my triumphant mood ended abruptly; honestly, I’ve never celebrated becoming a doctor. I didn’t even get to a graduation I had spent years fantasising about.

Looking back, I realise I should’ve acknowledged the achievement of completing a successful viva with chemo running through my body. I didn’t because I made decisions through my insecurities, like my age, I was nearing 60 by then. Instead of praising my resilience, I now thought it a weakness to have taken so long. By declaring the success of a viva with chemo burning my cells, I feared others would quietly believe it had been given to me in sympathy, thereby not genuinely earning it. In my world of imaginary voices, I heard, ‘Oh, they must’ve felt sorry for her. She might’ve died’. After so many years of hard work, the thought of being given a PhD out of sympathy for breast cancer was more devastating than the diagnosis itself. Knowing the world finds it difficult to respect black women as it is, I was silent about what privately felt like a great victory.

I’m slightly embarrassed to concede that I have never fully overcome an almost ridiculous, irrational childhood burden. It is that of lacking intelligence. That’s the deepest scar I carry, from being a black baby fostered and raised in the white care system and growing up in an all-white English family, town, and school. Sometimes I look back at that young Marlene and think of where we are now in 2023, to imagine how difficult and stressful it would still be for a black child to grow up in those circumstances. It shocks me that those old psychological wounds can still linger.

That’s not to say I wasn’t a friendly, sociable child because I was and remain so as a mature woman. Yet, my love for my foster family was often met with distance and a requirement to know my place. The looks of hostility in the eyes of some of my foster siblings could render me awkward, argumentative, then mute and isolated. In short, I irritated them easily because I never seemed to be what they needed me to be. That, or I was poor at figuring it out or performing it.

Within the family, I was that ‘insider-outsider’ that Audre Lorde spoke of. Many will resonate with a similar family role as the ‘black sheep’, and let’s face it, families can be toxic places of injustice for the best of us. Still, being a rootless black child without an idea of her past was challenging. The pain of loving those that don’t want to love you back is to create a wound as damaging as carving grooves into stone. If the human condition requires to be loved and to give love, it is not only a state of impoverishment for it to be denied, but perhaps something more fundamental. Looking back over sixty years, I imagine that’s where I grew dis-aligned between my mind, body and soul. I was not at peace with myself. Even now, I still suffer the urge to pursue that unrequited love though I’ve learned, through self-love, to resist and accept it is what it is.

Maybe it was because my foster family valued qualifications, but that sense of feeling I was not enough drove me to collect five degrees in a determined effort to escape what felt like an indelible mark inscribed on me as dumb and stupid. Or maybe it said ‘not acceptable’ or ‘invaluable’ that I misread as not bright. Either way, I felt better and cleansed with each degree I attained but struggled to sustain it. Over time, I would steadily leak confidence and self-belief at my deepest core. Perhaps not at the same rate, but drip by drip, that feeling of a sinkhole opening as if formed from the earth’s abyss would return. Sometimes, I thought qualifications would give me the lifeboat of social respect. Other times, it was an act of revenge against those unable to see me beyond something ‘dark’ and negative. It’s not that I didn’t love the joy of learning and progress. I did, but I’m not sure which I needed more.

My first degree was in law seeking social justice, though I didn’t permit myself to attend the graduation after failing to obtain my predicted 2.1 grade. Looking back at that young woman, I would apologise and be much more self-loving and forgiving. My MA in Ethnic & Gender Studies asked, ‘Is there a Common Identity in Black Transracial Adults?’ My PhD in Educational Studies explored ‘Black Students in Further Educational Colleges’. And between my studies, I lived in and out of therapy for thirty-odd years. I don’t think I would have survived without that. Suffice it to say that every qualification I attained, including two post-graduate certificates, can be traced back to the shaping of my earlier years. I was collecting qualifications and trying to find myself within and through them.

I am secure about my intelligence at the cognitive level, but emotionally, breast cancer exposed lingering doubts in me. For example, although I formally announced having breast cancer to my Facebook friends and did it from a politically informative perspective, I never announced that I had become a doctor though I’m sure I wanted the whole world to know, at least on some level.

Nor can I help but notice that my intimate relationships with women were largely unhealthy and mirrored the profile of my foster family, maybe I should say foster mother. By no stretch of the imagination was she a bad person, but she had a lot of internal struggles, and despite being a biological mother to four children, she divorced herself from most social interactions. Except for her deep kindness to animals, she had limited love to give to anybody, much less me. I was her rescuer and the listener to her adult problems at a far too young age. Unfortunately, I’ve repeated the role of the rescuer in lesbian relationships to collect a long line of narcissists, to the point that I’ll be disappointed if I ever have another serious intimate relationship with another woman. It’s a judgement on me rather than lesbianism because there aren’t enough years to disentangle that upbringing coupled with the limited love of a white foster mother and an absent black biological one. Maybe there never was.

Obviously, not always, but the challenges for black women with transracial backgrounds left to negotiate the bog of a racial society, half of it out of our peripheral vision or experience, can be a cruel unsupported way to grow up. I don’t want more of us to exist, yet it is only because the authentic black transracial experience lacks a powerful collective voice that little outside the political arena is genuinely understood. That’s why the extent of racial isolation and dislocation can go relatively ignored and unmeasured – certainly where mental and physical health is concerned. Am I suggesting research would confirm a disproportionate amount of unhealthy black transracial people in adulthood? Yes, I think I am. I suspect black transracial adults would be overly represented in the psychiatric wards and/or our prison cells.  

Nan Shin, who with breast cancer, wrote Diary of a Zen Nun, says culture lies at the core of who you are, and culture is what is left after everything you have learned is stripped away. I wondered about that for black transracial people. What is left of us if our starting position was all learned from the outset? I used to think we are formed from the crevices of a racially divided society. The fact that ‘trans-racial’ exists as an identity confirms society’s racial shift from point A to point B, or what need is there for the ‘trans’ in racial? Transracial is to race distinctions between black and white, what transgender is to binary gender categories of female and male. Interestingly, large sections of mainstream society embrace transracial in a way that it struggles with transgender.

In any event, it is more accurate to say we, as black transracial people, are not in the racial crevices of society but are them. We exist between two black-and-white worlds with a tenuous membership through social displacement distinct from the mixed-race union.  

We testify not only to the disjointed, contradictory notion of racial equality in British society but also as a perfunctory glue between those two racial worlds.

Our white parents keep their fingers crossed that the black children they raised will choose because they know they will have to in a way that no child should be required to. The decision to look and find my biological parents were perceived as an act of betrayal or revolt, so it gave me an appearance of choosing. Or rather, it gave my white family the right to infer my choice as if acceptance had been so fully and easily available.

To be black transracial is to be an ‘untouchable’, geographically and metaphorically speaking. White but not, black but not is an untouchable location. It’s a place without visual or geographical recognition. If the apex of a triangle represents the union of black and white couples to produce mix-race lives, the base of that triangle is where the black transracial being is formed and confined without escape if you’re left there for too long. That racial displacement and the delicate belonging to families create an almost impossible path to walk. That would be a path less journeyed without the wisdom of others who have known the inevitable pitfalls and the life skills to negotiate them. I’m not saying I didn’t acquire some important social skills growing up. I’m saying they were limited to living in small provincial English towns.

With my now diseased breast and a small scar down the side but in a culturally mixed environment, I wondered whether I was untouchable again. I wondered whether the power of my sexuality would return to me. I was worried about losing the sensation of my left nipple that had given me so much pleasure throughout my life. Honestly, I lost most of it though I appreciate that it’s a minor price to pay in the full scheme of things. And I was worried about who I was now in relation to my future lovers/partners. I feared having breast cancer meant I was now a disabled, diseased black woman with imperfect breasts and a nipple functioning below par to be thrown onto the masculine pile of old, decrepit dried-up women.

At the same time, I’m convinced that if we live with a healthy dose of engagement with the world, we will inevitably experience some trauma, and I don’t wish to be protected from life itself. The truth is it’s impossible to be so specific to say my breast cancer is rooted in my upbringing, as in my inability to overcome my background completely, especially since I no longer feel solely defined by it. I’ve had plenty of heartbroken personal relationships and other experiences to select from too. Yet, a common theme that seems to run through the stories of breast cancer is that of some trauma – an unreconciled heartfelt pain that lies dormant in the mistaken belief that it has actually gone. I often and unexpectedly found myself in childhood reading those breast cancer stories.

While the broader issues of environmental pollutants, systemic racism, Western Imperialism, our general health, diet, a very small percentage of genetics, and the quality of our lives undoubtedly feed the underlying causes of breast cancer. At the personal level, those quietly festering traumas that have you feeling helpless, lost, and so unloved that you tell yourself, ‘I’m over it,’ deserve more of your attention. Those unresolved traumas might be the difference between you experiencing breast cancer and somebody else not doing so, even with a similar lifestyle, general health and family profile. 

Though a psychotherapist might disagree, and this certainly isn’t about self-blame – far from it, I just suspect that if there is a relationship between deep-seated trauma and breast cancer, mine might have something to do with my desperation for external acceptance and my initial lack of self-value. Not to mention I’m a sugar-driven, wine-drinking vegan. I developed a very early comfort and craving for cancer’s favourite carcinogen that I still have to ‘manage’, and thank God for red wine, or maybe not.

So, now I can see I was trying to fit into, I don’t know what, but I was trying hard to do it. I thought the ‘qualifications key’ was my entry in. Maybe to some extent, it has been.

Nevertheless, that lack of a robust family support system mattered greatly when I was diagnosed. It had me question whether I was supposed to survive. Initially, I didn’t think people like me were meant to and was so sure I’d come to the end of the line I went about planning a dignified exit. As usual, I was highly blessed in other ways. I had some wonderful biological family members in Ian and Maurice. I was lucky to be living with Chris, a caring friend, my boss Vicky was amazing, and I had some solid girlfriends in Maura, Nicola, and Juliet. They put me straight. Breast cancer taught me how loved I was by so many. Fortunately, I had left a toxic relationship just a few years before. Otherwise, I truly don’t think I would’ve survived.

Weirdly, I’d have to say breast cancer has taught me to take an honest, kind and forgiving look at myself so that, ultimately, it’s been a positive experience I hope never to ‘appreciate’ again.