my cancer archive
The 20th of October 2023 I received a triple negative breast cancer diagnosis.
It seems daft to spell it out, but my life has drastically changed since that day. My body and my heart are not the same, and my mind is definitely not the same.
Having cancer has been a trauma, and like it happens for most traumatic experiences, it has been impossible for me to actually live it while it was happening: I was too focused on the sole act of surviving. But, as Derrida put it many years ago, the form of recording (writing, archiving, storing) is capable not only of reflecting time but also of constructing it.
The term archive comes from the Greek arkheion, the house of the magistrates or archons who held the authority to interpret and command the law. Therefore, the act of creating an archive is a power-driven, archontic process that establishes, interprets, and sometimes even restricts the narrative of an event. How we choose to archive an event or a series of events determines our individual and collective memory of what has happened and how it has happened.
the archive produces the event as much as it records it
I thought, then, that perhaps archiving my disease could construct a meaning and a memory that can alter, modify, who knows even broaden, the meaning and memory of when I was experiencing it. Or trying to, really.
I have been surviving cancer for two years, now.
Along the way, between chemotherapy and radiotherapy, and across surgeries and again chemotherapy, and after all of it, I found solace in the written words, in art, in companionship, in data, and mostly in the magic mix of it all.
Here are some silly little things that kept me floating when I thought I was going to drown:
And a somehow a tiny bigger thing that reconstructs (part of) my cancer journey: