Nine years ago, my brother died from cancer.

I don’t remember much from that time. Just little things. Humming The Beatles to myself while I washed my hands in the bathroom at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda because his agonal breathing had finally stopped. Stroking the little fuzz on his head that had returned because the chemotherapy had finally run out of his system, but not for the right reasons. Taking too long to put my shoes on when my dad woke me up because my mom had called from the hospital room, which is never a good thing at one in the morning.

For a long time, these memories were painful, and something I chose to run as far away from as I could. I countered questions about my mental health following his funeral by denying I was affected. I refused to speak to therapists. I threw myself into the wrong things, clung to the wrong people.

After seven years, I pulled myself out of it. I confronted my grief and began to heal. I allowed myself, though in small ways, to talk about the tragedy that surrounded me for so long.

What I found when I came out of my shell, however, was a world that had already engaged in my story. And how could they not? For most of my childhood it was plastered on every social media page, every church bulletin, every text message sent in the small town where my family lived. But there was more. Underneath the surface, the world had already decided, based on what they’d seen, how my version of events had gone.

At times, this can be useful. Cancer is a wall, one that can rise suddenly and randomly in conversation, and when it happens, it can be a hard wall to strike down, or one that I don’t want to, because after a while it becomes something I’d just like to move on from. The knowledge of my story is a hammer that keeps the wall from coming up in the first place.

Sometimes, however, it is less a hammer and more a sword, wielded by those who, instead of choosing to break the wall, cut off my legs to keep me from climbing over it.  The sword-wielders don’t tell the story so much as they rip it from me. They tell new friends when I meet them because they worry I can’t handle my own trauma. They tell the girls I like to prepare them for the dark abscess taking me on must be. They tell each other because gossip is the most valuable form of currency. 

When trauma happens, it is swift and breaking. I have fought for the past few years to be free from it. Some people never will. Some people will never be ready to share their stories.

I ask then, that when you hear someone’s story, you consider not only what its teller is wielding, but also what you want to wield. 

Are you sword or hammer?