The True Story of the Mental and Emotional Health of Survivorship

WebMD

13-05-2025

May marks Mental Health Awareness Month, and for many of us living in the aftermath of breast cancer, it brings a quiet invitation to look inward – beyond the scars, the statistics, and the survival stories – into the less-visible terrain: our mental and emotional healing.
Survivorship is often misunderstood. From the outside, it might seem like the "hard part" is over. But surviving breast cancer is not a clean endpoint. It's a continued, evolving process of facing what is – and grieving what isn't.
The truth is, survivorship is messy. It is confusing. It's full of contradictory emotions: relief and resentment, gratitude and grief, hope and fear. It's grieving the body we once had, the future we thought we were building, the safety of our bodies, and the certainty that once grounded us. And all of that is normal.
What I've come to understand – both professionally as a mental health provider and personally as someone living this – is that processing emotions isn't about fixing ourselves. It's about building capacity. When we allow ourselves to feel grief, anger, guilt, and uncertainty, we are not failing at healing – we are actively participating in the human experience of it.
Too often, especially in cancer spaces, we are praised for being positive, strong, and 'fighting' with grace. But the external and internal expectation to be endlessly resilient can create shame when the harder emotions inevitably show their faces. We need to normalize the full emotional experience of survivorship. We need to say: Feeling is not weakness. It is a human experience.
We don't process our emotions to make them disappear. We process to understand. We make space for them. We feel them to reclaim our humanity. That is what builds resilience – not emotional perfection, but emotional presence.
This month, I've been reflecting on what it means to truly care for our mental health after cancer. It's not a single breakthrough moment. It's building a toolbox – one coping skill at a time. For me, that's meant:
And maybe most importantly: letting go of the idea that I have to 'move on' from what changed me. Healing doesn't mean erasing what happened. It means integrating it, day by day, in a way that honors where you've been and who you're still becoming.
So to my fellow survivors – and to anyone sitting with hard feelings this month – I offer this:
You are not broken because you're still grieving.
You are not weak because you still worry.
You are not behind because healing doesn't look linear.
Real progress isn't the absence of feeling – it's the willingness to be with yourself, fully, even when it hurts. This is how we rebuild. This is how we rise – not by denying our pain, but by holding it gently.
Let May be a reminder: Your mental health matters in survivorship, not just in treatment. Your emotions are not problems to solve – they are evidence that you're alive, still in it, and still moving forward.