Get Off the F%&king Branch

“You must be so happy to be getting back to normal.”

Squints.

Normal?

Define normal.

Because I'm 65 years old and still consider a peanut butter and jelly sandwich a perfectly respectable lunch.

I talk to myself in the grocery store.

I have been known to walk into a room, forget why I'm there, leave, remember, walk back in and forget AGAIN.

And I recently spent a considerable amount of time contemplating having the word PUSSY permanently tattooed on my body 🙈(more on this later).

So let's not get reckless with the word normal.

But I know what people mean.

Am I feeling better?

Yes.

Am I getting stronger?

Yes.

Am I cancer-free?

HELL YES.

Am I going back to the Barbara I was before cancer?

Ehhhhhhhhhh.

I don't think she's here anymore.

Not in a sad, cue-the-violins, “cancer changed me” Lifetime movie sort of way.

More like...

Have you ever really thought about how fucking weird a butterfly is?

Stay with me.

A caterpillar spends its entire existence crawling around on its belly.

Up the branch.

Down the branch.

Across the leaf.

Inch. Inch. Inch.

That's its world.

Then one day it apparently decides:

Fuck this branch.

Wraps itself in a tiny sleeping bag, turns its entire body into biological soup—which, by the way, HOW DID WE ALL JUST ACCEPT THIS AS NORMAL?—and eventually comes out with BIG BEAUTIFUL WINGS.

Same little creature.

Completely different way of moving through the world.

Nobody stands underneath yelling:

“HEY! GET BACK ON THE BRANCH!”

Because that would be ridiculous.

It has fucking wings now.

And lately I've been wondering if that's what's happening to me.

Maybe cancer wasn't just something I needed to survive so I could hurry up and get back on my branch.

Maybe the woman who went into surgery, chemo and radiation isn't supposed to come out wanting exactly the same things.

Because I don't.

My body is different.

My brain is different.

My priorities are different.

The future looks different.

Even work—which has always been such a big part of who I am—looks different.

And that's the one that's really screwing with my head.

Because during treatment, I reduced my business to a handful of clients I love.

They didn't chase me.

They didn't demand things.

They didn't ask why something took longer than usual.

They knew what I was doing.

Trying to survive.

But here's the weird part:

I kept working.

Not because anyone made me.

Because I wanted to.

I'd lie in my husband's big black recliner with my legs practically over my head, with my computer on my lap and write an email.

Or a sequence.

Or a few pages of my book.

Some days the words came.

Other days my chemo brain would look at a sentence I'd written and go:

What language is this?

But writing gave me somewhere to go.

For a few hours, I wasn't Cancer Patient Barbara.

I was a writer.

I could still make someone laugh.

Make someone think.

Make someone buy something.

I was still useful.

Still creative.

Still me.

Except...

maybe not the same me.

Because now that I'm cancer-free, theoretically I'm supposed to climb back onto that branch.

Get more clients.

Go to networking events.

Shake hands.

Pass out business cards.

Post more.

Sell more.

Grow more.

More more more more more.

Vomits slightly in mouth.

And here's where things get even more interesting.

Because while I was busy having my own personal metamorphosis, work was having one too.

AI has changed the game.

Not someday.

Not when the robots arrive and start stealing our parking spaces.

Now.

Writer Ash Ambirge recently described the new working world as having two buckets:

Democratized Work.

And Professionalized Work.

Democratized Work is all the stuff that used to require a certain level of skill, training or money that suddenly almost anyone can produce.

Need a logo?

Click.

Need a website?

Clickity-click.

Need 27 Instagram captions about National Donut Day?

CLICK CLICK CLICK.

Need an email?

Well...

Barbara nervously adjusts her collar.

That's the reality.

AI has made producing the thing easier.

And that's not necessarily bad.

The printing press democratized books.

Canva democratized design.

The iPhone democratized photography.

And AI is democratizing a whole lot of work we've spent years convincing everyone was terribly complicated.

Awkward.

But then there's the other bucket:

Professionalized Work.

That's where your experience matters.

Your judgment.

Your taste.

Your ideas.

Your weird little brain that connects something nobody else thought to connect.

It's not just:

Can you write the email?

It's:

Do you know how to write an email like a human?

There's a difference.

A big one.

AI can give you 50 subject lines before you've finished your PB&J.

But which one makes a human being stop scrolling?

Which one sounds like you?

Which story should you tell?

Which thing should you sell?

Should you even send the damn email?

That's not output.

That's thinking.

And maybe that's where my two worlds collided.

Because while AI is busy changing the value of what we make...

cancer changed the value I put on how I spend my time making it.

Well, shit.

Maybe I don't actually want to rebuild the business I had.

Maybe I don't want ten clients.

Maybe I don't want to manage everybody's email marketing.

Maybe I don't want to spend the next five years proving I can grow an agency just because that's the direction I was headed before cancer showed up.

Maybe Foreplay Copy needs to change because I changed.

And maybe your version isn't cancer.

Maybe you got divorced.

Retired.

Lost someone.

Got fired.

Sold something.

Turned 50.

Turned 60.

Turned 64 and discovered that apparently your knees now have opinions about stairs.

Whatever it was, something shifted.

And now you're still inching up the same branch because...

well...

that's the branch.

You've been on it for years.

We humans are spectacularly good at this.

We keep pursuing the career we decided we wanted at 35.

Keep running the business the way we've always run it.

Keep saying yes to things we don't want to do.

Keep chasing the next income goal.

The next title.

The next client.

The next whatever.

Because stopping long enough to ask “Do I still want this?” feels dangerously close to being ungrateful.

Or lazy.

Or irresponsible.

That's the part I'm wrestling with.

I have financial goals.

I want to contribute.

Social Security isn't exactly screaming, GO WILD, BARBARA. ORDER THE GUAC.

So yes, I want to make money.

But I also want to write my book.

Get strong again.

Eat better (a woman can’t survive on PB&J alone).

Travel.

Spend time with Mike.

Be with my family and friends.

Write things that make you laugh, think, reply, unsubscribe in horror or forward them to your friend with:

“OMG. This woman.”

Maybe I teach.

Maybe I create digital products.

Maybe I write more.

Maybe I become the person you hire for her brain instead of the number of emails she can crank out in a month.

I don't know exactly what this becomes yet.

And that's kind of the point.

We spend so much time trying to figure out the next move before we're willing to leave the old one.

We want the five-year plan.

The revenue projection.

The strategy.

The guarantee.

Show me exactly where these wings are taking me.

Except that's not how wings work.

At some point...

you have to get off the fucking branch.

Maybe you don't need cancer to give yourself permission to ask the question.

Maybe you just need to notice that the life you're working so hard to maintain was designed by an earlier version of you.

And she wasn't wrong.

She got you here.

But she didn't know everything you know now.

So maybe this isn't about getting back to normal at all.

Maybe it's about becoming whatever comes next.

I spent a lot of this year fighting like hell to stay alive.

Now comes the strange part:

figuring out how I want to live.

I don't need another branch.

I need to fly!