The Long Pause

The truth is: I haven’t touched my camera in months. Not because I don’t love it, not because I’ve made some brave artistic shift, not because I’ve traded light for language—but because I’m tired in the way only the dying understand.

Cancer is not poetic. It is not a chrysalis. It is not “a season.” It is an eraser. And lately, it has rubbed clean every image I once saw so clearly.

Before all this, I lived with a camera at my hip like a gunslinger. My eye was always half-cocked. A shaft of light, a broken window, the shadow on a woman’s neck—I noticed it all. Framed it before I even blinked. But now, I walk past miracles of light like they’re litter. I look at beauty and feel nothing. Not hunger. Not awe. Not even envy. Just a dull echo: “you should shoot that.” And then I don’t.

Burnout, they call it. As if I was a candle, romantic and warm, instead of a furnace that ran out of coal. It’s not just fatigue—it’s refusal. My body refuses. My brain refuses. Even my fingers, those old, clever things that once knew how to spin sun flares and silence into a living, refuse. They tremble on shutter buttons like they’ve forgotten how to want.

And I’m afraid.

Not of dying. (That, I’m oddly calm about.) I’m afraid of becoming irrelevant. I’m afraid that while I’m pausing, the world keeps galloping forward, drunk on ambition and good health. My peers are out there building empires while I scroll past their announcements from the oncology waiting room. I don’t resent them—I resent the distance.

There’s a particular cruelty in feeling both incapable and left behind. Like I’ve tripped on the track and everyone else kept running, and I’m just sitting here, blood in my sock, whispering that I used to be fast.

But I haven’t broken up with my camera. I tell myself that. I repeat it like a vow. I’m not done. I’m just… else. I’m in the long pause, the comma before the sentence finds its point again. I think maybe my eye is not dead—it’s dreaming. Or worse: it’s healing. Slowly. Suspiciously. Like a lover who’s been lied to.

In the meantime, I write.

Writing has become the last working valve in a failing heart. It’s the only creative act that still obeys me. The only thing I can do from bed, from chemo once I start, from the shallows of despair. And maybe—maybe—that’s not a loss, but a shift. Maybe my lens has turned inward, and these words are just photographs of the soul, slowly developing in the dark.

So no, I haven’t quit. I’ve just changed mediums. And if my camera ever does forgive me, I hope it understands why I left.

I was sick.

I was tired.

But I was still trying to see.

A blog post by Rachel Smak on grief, loss, and lessons from stage 3C rectal cancer