Synkroniciti is pleased to welcome writer Laura Collins, who resides in northern England. Laura has grown her writing skills by blogging and brings a wonderful naturalness, honesty and vulnerability to her work that is nurtured by that platform. “Belonging beyond worlds” is a summary of her struggle with cancer at the age of 29. The experience is quite fresh, as she had been in remission for only 18 months at the time of her writing, and yet it already has given her a new interpretation of life.
“I wondered if I should be worrying about the things other 30-year-old women were worried about: houses, relationships, mortgages, kids, careers. Were those things even possible post-cancer? Or should I just be grateful to be alive? I found myself confused—really confused—about how I should be feeling. I watched a friend’s one-year-old and saw how tender and vulnerable he was. I felt like that too. But I wasn’t a toddler, and people expected the Laura they’d always known.”
She shows us that the recovery process is complex and she provides relief from the desperate, warriorlike positivity that often surrounds cancer patients, a positivity that can be toxic, that can make people feel shame for the negative thoughts they experience. Sick, disabled, depressed, heavily medicated, we must remind people affected by cancer and other diseases that they are still human and still belong, that their feelings are valid. Laura’s response is intelligent, at once sobering and encouraging, and her ability to put it into words is extraordinary.
“I get to live these moments, and I was never promised that. None of us are. I can’t undo my time in the cancer world, nor erase it from my life history, but I know that I’m not alone: one in two of us will experience cancer. Even Kings and Duchesses aren’t immune. But many of us will also survive it and be thrown into a world where the sky is green and the grass is blue. Life post-cancer will be different for us. Perhaps that could even be a good thing.”
Read “Belonging beyond worlds” in Synkroniciti’s “Belonging” issue, available here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/. Don’t miss this emerging writer and her unique, yet relatable, experience.
Laura Collins is an editor of hiking guidebooks by day and an aspiring writer by night, living in the picturesque Lake District in Northern England. With a Biology degree from St Andrews, Scotland, she has also lived in Brussels, Brisbane, Paris, and Singapore (while studying for a Masters in Tropical Biology). Writing has always been her passion though, and she enjoys sharing her journey on her blog, https://lauraricecake.blog/, which has evolved from travel stories to poetry to cancer recovery reflections. Laura also loves plunging into freezing cold lakes and spending as much time as possible in the hills.