I'm Not Your Hero

I leveraged my medical history for a job I despised.

A web of complicated trade-offs emerged after I traded employment for access to my personal life.

When I was finally offered a job after half a year of unemployment post-college, I had no choice but to accept it. I had never lived outside of my home state of Kentucky and felt apprehensively empowered as I packed up my 400-square-foot apartment in Lexington and headed south to Jacksonville, Florida. I convinced myself this was an opportunity. An opportunity beyond a job, an opportunity to distance myself from my past and reinvent myself in a sunny surrounding. Fate, however, has a bitter sense of humor. The only employer that deemed me hirable was the Blood Cancer Society. The organization's mission to cure leukemia and other related diseases was noble and worthy, but here I was, a childhood leukemia survivor leveraging my history in exchange for payment to fund my escape hatch, rent, and bar tab.

I'd intentionally kept my survivorship a secret for the past ten years. From my experience, when someone finds out you're a survivor (in my case cancer), you can practically count to three and observe as that person's demeanor and posture shifts with the newfound knowledge. Your otherwise Average Joe existence is elevated with a badge of survival to somewhere between bless-her-heart sainthood and Lifetime movie lead. And with this, you're cast as a role model or icon for perseverance, simply because you lived. Because of a freakish mutation of cells that wasn't of my choosing, I was placed in the delicate cycle and labeled "fragile" for most of my youth, when I desperately desired to be treated like the everyday garbage my teenage peers experienced. In high school, an intramural soccer coach took this to an extreme. When a swift soccer ball was launched in my direction and I stopped the ball with my torso, it imprinted an Adidas logo on my midsection. As my teammates and I howled with amusement at the sight of the temporary tattoo, the coach shrilled his whistle and yanked me from the field for the rest of the game.

When you open up the survivor box, it's as if an unwritten negotiation occurs. In exchange for the details of my humbling story to make you feel better about your pristine health, I get something back. A spot on the varsity soccer team. A scholarship. And in this case, a revenue stream.

For my new position at the Blood Cancer Society, I was responsible for recruiting volunteers to participate in fundraising campaigns in markets in Jacksonville, Gainesville, and Tallahassee to hit the organization's cancer research revenue goals. In reality, this meant hauling a rolling crate with fifteen pounds of marketing swag to musty conference rooms along Interstate 10. Under the glare and persistent buzzing from the overworked fluorescent lighting, I regurgitated an hour-long talk with a dead-eye stare on the mission of the organization and persuaded selfless strangers to volunteer their time to fundraise for the organization.

Before I could be trusted to take my solo act on the road, I was asked to present my talk to the local office of fundraising coworkers. I was acutely aware this rehearsal represented a rite of passage for new employees at the nonprofit. We each had different fundraising programs that we managed in various northeastern Florida markets. Although our local chapter was judged successful based on whether or not we hit our shared fundraising goal, my coworkers were fiercely competitive and took hitting their individual fundraising goals seriously.

I felt certain I'd nailed the rehearsal talk. I paused dramatically in front of my coworkers to demonstrate what I hoped passed as empathy when reciting the pediatric cancer stats. I mustered conviction and enthusiasm to hold up my end of the deal. I should have felt deep compassion and appreciation as I stood in front of my new colleagues and rehearsed my fundraising recruitment talk. In reality, I practiced a calloused and hollowed detachment from the...