I Wrote This in the Cold of Winter, at 3:04 AM

I didn’t want to wake anyone up.
Not literally. No one was in the house.
But also—not spiritually. Not emotionally. I didn’t want to be a burden or an emergency or a red flag.

So I posted on Reddit.

Anonymous. Middle of the night. One of those haunted insomniac hours when your body forgets how to regulate temperature and your brain forgets how to tell the truth gently.

I couldn’t sleep. Couldn’t pray. Couldn’t stop thinking about how long it takes cancer to kill a person when they stop trying to stop it. I had just found out I had what I now know of a stage 3c rectal cancer. I didn’t have a plan. I didn’t want to ask for help. I didn’t want to make small talk about alternative therapies or hope or optimism or mindset. I just needed to say the thing I couldn’t say to anyone in my actual life:

I was contemplating letting the cancer take me. And I didn’t feel like I could say that out loud and still be loved.

So I said it anonymously. To strangers. On a grief support forum.

What happened next surprised me. The internet didn’t try to fix me. Not all of it, anyway. Most of the responses weren’t performative or transactional. They weren’t spiritual bypassing. They were stories. Brutal, beautiful, terrible stories. People whose parents had died screaming from colon cancer. People who lost husbands, daughters, lovers. People who said please don’t go out like this, I watched someone I love try and I still hear them scream in my dreams. People who said I didn’t get a chance to fight and I’d give anything to have had one.

I’ve posted some of those responses below. Screenshots, for now, because I want to preserve the rawness in how they were written. But here’s a short summary for anyone who needs the TL;DR or doesn’t want to scroll through each reply one by one:

What Strangers on the Internet Told Me About Dying from Colon Cancer
(a summary of the hundreds of replies I got in the dark)

Almost every person who watched someone die from colon cancer described it as brutal: pain that opioids couldn’t touch, weeks of screaming, last-minute regrets, ER visits that led straight to hospice.
People begged me not to wait. The most common refrain was: “My parent/spouse/child waited too long. They thought they were managing it. By the time they went in, it was too late.”
Western medicine didn’t work for everyone, but it did prolong life for some. Some credited chemo and radiation for giving them or their loved ones a few more good years. Others shared regrets—wishing they’d done something sooner, no matter what it was.
Very few believed healing was possible without chemotherapy. That was maybe the saddest part. Not in a judgmental way, just in a collective-grief way. Like watching a whole room of people who’ve only ever been given one map, with one route, and it’s a route paved in blind obedience. There was an unspoken belief in many of the responses that choosing anything other than chemo was synonymous with choosing death. That there are no other doors. That anything holistic, spiritual, or alternative is just another way to suffer slower.
And I get it. I really do. When you’ve watched someone you love die screaming, it’s hard to believe in gentler ways. I don’t know if I believe in miracles. But I do believe in listening to the body. I believe most of us were handed a map someone else drew in a panic, with one thick black line traced over and over until it tore through the paper. And when you ask if there’s another route, people look at you like you’re trying to die on purpose. I’m not anti-treatment. I’m just pro-curiosity. Pro-other-options. Pro-not-having-to-choose-between-pain-and-poverty. I’m just tired of pretending there’s only one definition of trying.
So many people related to the grief, the bingeing, the alcohol, the collapse. The comments turned into a grief group. A room full of strangers passing around their worst moments like a bottle of water, just trying to hydrate the part of you that feels dehydrated from screaming into your pillow.
Some reminded me that I have a gift for writing and that my story could matter. Not in a cheesy "you’re meant for more" way, but in a blood-and-guts "I read your post and it cracked something open in me" kind of way.
A few told me gently that trauma and grief can metastasize. Not just into illness, but into inertia. That death by neglect isn’t the same as dying peacefully. And that maybe this wasn’t the end. Maybe it was just a deeply uncomfortable middle.

I’m not sharing this because I’ve made a decision. I’m still here, obviously, and I’m still unsure what comes next. But I wanted this moment archived somewhere that feels like it belongs to me. Somewhere with intention. Somewhere other than a Reddit thread buried under a mountain of posts about breakups and cry-for-help memes.

So here it is. This is what I wrote in the cold of winter, at 3:04 AM, when I didn’t feel like I could be honest with anyone in my life. And this is what came back.

Title:
I have colon cancer at 38 yrs old and secretly contemplating letting it take over me

Posted on:
r/GriefSupport · 6 mo. ago
Representative-Ad443

Some context for you dear reader. At 32 I lost my mother to suicide. She hung herself on the living room ceiling fan of my brownstone apartment.

I was the one that found her, cut her lifeless body down, and called 911.

Since the day I found her dead, I’ve prayed to die. I’m spiritually inclined so while I’ve definitely tried passively killing myself via alcohol poisoning, I would never take my own life, even though I have been miserable without her in it.

The year after she died I packed up everything I owned quit my job and moved out west to a state I knew absolutely no one in to start over and take a crack at finally pursuing my dream career in a creative field.

The first year was tough, but so was I. I established the connections needed to stay a full time creative. I was even albeit, gasp happy.

But then Covid hit. And forced me to finally examine the grief around my mother’s death alone in a state where I had no family.

I started binge drinking heavily despite never having issues with alcohol like my mother or brother did. Tell me what pairs better with alcohol, isolation, and grief than cigarettes? And weed? And uber eats to soak up all the booze.

6 months into Covid and I’d gained so much weight that I went from a size 8 to a size 18.

This carried on quite successfully without anyone being any wiser. Everyone’s working from home and can’t see how I’ve let myself go and those I did see had no knowledge of the person I was before my mom died to see I had a major coping problem.

Eventually the grief wanted more from me than I could give her. The 20mg edible and half a bottle of vodka wouldn’t make me black out for days on end like I used to but I physically couldn’t stomach more drugs or alcohol.

So I sat in limbo. Successful full time freelancing creative by day—fledgling addict by night.

This went on for 3 years until last year when my dad was dying from dementia. I cleaned up with my own will power to head back home to be with him while he passed.

More grief. And despite Covid restrictions being lifted people still treat the bereaved like they have an infectious disease.

I have a large following on social media. Lots of networks, industry friends, clients but the silence the second time around losing a parent was deafening.

Everyone knew I had nowhere to go for the holidays but not once, not ever, not a single person ever invited me to spend a holiday with them or their family so I didn’t have to suffer it alone.

Alan Watt’s be damned.

Which almost brings me to the title of this post. You see this past summer I woke up one day still drowning in grief but entirely over the way I’d let it consume me. So on a whim I started fasting.

Which isn’t a particularly odd thing for me since I’ve completed many fasts in my life. But this year I went full Jesus mode in the desert and completed a 40 day water only fast. I give Jesus lots of credit because I at least had AC to escape to.

I felt the most alive I’ve ever felt in my entire life. It’s really a whole separate post I need to write about some day soon because for a brief moment in time I felt my cellular body in ways I’ve never felt before and have a deeper appreciation and understanding for the teachings of Jesus, budha, Gandhi etc…

The only thing I couldn’t wrap my head around was why I kept having diarrhea. After day 15 without any food or calories the body should have emptied. By day 35 I caught Norovirus which sent my weak ass to the hospital.

After baffled looks from my Dr. when I tell them about my fast and the continuous bottom purging that I just now realized started back in 2020 they refer me to get a colonoscopy.

I’m expecting IBS. Or maybe a mold related illness from the apartment I was living in at the time. But when my eyelids flutter open post op, my gastrointestinal Dr is telling me I have colon cancer.

A quick google search shows that alcohol consumption, smoking, and being obese are all linked factors in colon cancer diagnosis.

I have no one else to blame but myself.

And now with a deep distrust for western health care after watching it fuck my mom over and the entire world during Covid.

I don’t trust this medicine. I have my reasons. And unfortunately Dr. can’t and won’t prescribe me anything else besides chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery to remove half my anus.

I don’t want to die, I want to explore every holistic, spiritual, and eastern therapies I can afford—fuck I’d even try a poop transplant because there are some interesting studies on the gut bacteria being restored after one.

I don’t want to die but I’m also tired of fighting for survival. And tired of being alone through the hardest 5 fucking years I’ve ever heard anyone have to go through.

If I live I want it to be on my terms. Survival of the fittest. Natural selection? Continue the course of losing the rest of the grief weight and remaining sober and cigarette free. Possibly do another fast to starve the cancer since that feels more empowering than letting an insurance company bleed me dry and dictate how I treat my cancer.

Everything is connected. This cancer wasn’t an accident. And so I’m kinda thankful—grateful for this cancer diagnosis actually.

I don’t have to wish I was dead anymore, the cancer has that covered. Now I can focus on living my best healthiest life.

I’m oddly really at peace about this all and I’m not sure if it’s because the world is just so horse shit at caring about you when you’re down and out or if I’ve just spiritually evolved to some higher frequency.