as small as a world and as large as alone, natural–blues: I kind of wonder how many of...

12:12pm August 10, 2014

I kind of wonder how many of those people sneering about John Green making a story ‘exploiting’ cancer patients/people with genetic diseases that lead to cancer by making it a romance are actual cancer patients or people with these diseases.

I have a genetic disease that causes cancer when it gets bad. I have had cancer because of it, and gone through treatments and am in remission from the cancer part of it thanks to an amazing surgical team. But the other parts of that disease…. I am in treatments.

My girlfriend is by my side during this. Why are we not allowed to watch romance stories/read romance stories of people who are going through anything similar? Are we stuck watching the Hallmark Channel milk the living hell out of random people a decade or more older than us, who don’t understand our generations, going through cancer while they have their children around them, and they reaffirm their faith in God or whatever before tragedy strikes? Or the Lifetime Channel where a woman in her fifties gets cancer and learns herself as a woman and says goodbye to her children and grandchildren??

Why are those movies okay but John Green’s story is not? Is it because he doesn’t actually have cancer? Because he wrote it with a friend from childhood in mind?

Sweetheart, that’s how story writing works. How many of those writers of the Hallmark Channel have cancer, you think? Why are those movies considered heartwarming but John Green’s the Fault in our Stars is considered exploitative?

These movies aren’t as relevant to people my age who have no children. These movies aren’t about people in their twenties, who struggle to make it to University every day, who don’t get to have children, who just want to be young and have the same discussions about stuff we shared on Facebook or giggling about Doctor Who / Sherlock / SPN / OITNB / Orphan Black and Tumblr and want to feel like people their own age do but have had their maturing stunted by hospital visits and overprotective parents and can’t think too far into the future because for most of their youth they were warned they wouldn’t have one. The people my age who want to be able to see love stories, even ridiculous ones, about people like us. People who feel burdenous, who feel alone, who feel ignored. Did you ever think that a love story like that might make some feel heard? Feel less invisible?

We all have our stories, and many of those with these diseases just want to be seen as the teenagers, the twenty-somethings….. or sadly, as the children they are.

But as someone who does fight against her own genetics… I loved watching it, and will be reading the book too. I know a lot of you who do fight for social justice and the like want to protect and defend… but it feels like instead of defending us from someone exploiting us, you’re telling us that we’re not allowed to have romance flicks of our own.

The attempts to make us pristine and perfect to be respectful…. it’s all so much to live up to! No one is perfect 100% of the time, and we’re human beings. It’s not being disrespectful to paint us as human beings. It’s not disrespectful to make a 17 year old kid with cancer say something stupid about cigarettes the same as any other 17 year old boy can say something that didn’t translate across perfectly like he would have liked, and was instead viewed as stupid.

Most of us don’t want martyr stories about how pristine and perfect we were. We just want to be kids our age. John Green worked at a ward, he saw that and in my opinion, did a good job creating two teens struggling with a disease and falling in love. I’m grateful he did it. Watching it made me cry for the right reasons. Watching it and knowing how they feel, saying ‘I wish I’d thought of that’ or recalling my own group therapy sessions or doctor visits or seeing the adventure of Amsterdam and recalling my own adventure going to Florence. For teens and twenty-somethings who won’t get to have a European adventure where they meet an author they admire without the help of the Make-A-Wish Foundation or simply cannot because they aren’t well enough to travel…. seeing that on screen can be the same form of reaction as those teen romance flicks Disney keeps churning out about girls who somehow make it to Europe and meet the guy of their dreams etc etc etc. It’s just a beautiful concept.

Maybe you should stop speaking for us to ‘protect us’. Maybe before you get up in arms, you should consider what you’re really mad at and why, because to me it comes across as you wanting us to all have pristine martyr storylines and not have love stories like normal youths…. and in that case, it’s you who is being the ableist one.

I don’t have cancer. But when I first read the book, I was certain I was going to die, and if I hadn’t gotten a specific, surprisingly random diagnosis at the right time, I would’ve been right. And that book spoke to things about dying that other books refused to speak about. So it will always, always, always have a huge place in my heart, no matter what anyone else thinks about it. Now that I’m watching my father die of cancer, it’s acquiring a totally different significance. But its biggest significance for me was what it felt like to be young and dying and wondering your effect on other people and all these other things.

(Another book that had a similar effect on me, for utterly and totally different reasons, was At The Back of the North Wind by George MacDonald. I don’t expect modern, ultra-savvy young readers to like it, it’s a Victorian fairy tale written by the author to deal with his son dying young. And it has elements of Too Good For This World in it. But it, too, contained experiences within it that I could find nowhere else. And because of that, I’ll love it forever. I read it on my Kindle in another situation where I was likely to die and ended up surviving, for then.)

When you’re dying, you need books that speak to you honestly about elements of dying. TFIOS did it for me one way, ATBOTNW did it for me in quite a different way, but both of them were crucial for getting me through situations where I knew my own death was potentially imminent, even as many people around me pretended everything was okay. ATBOTNW did a lot for helping me accept death as a friendly presence in my life, weirdly enough, because it always seemed to be in the room at the time, and it wasn’t hard to figure out that my Death and the book’s North Wind were the same thing in a way. And… I can’t explain it, I can’t explain how he got so much so accurate, but he did. That was more the spiritual side of death, rather than the emotional side, but I needed that too.