November 8, 2010

blah blah cancer blah blah

What a long weekend.  I feel so old.  When did my life become conferences? Two conferences in three days was exhausting both physically and mentally.

I spent all of Thursday at the LIVESTRONG Young Adult Alliance conference.  I was invited by one of the faculty in the School of Social Work that does her research on childhood cancer survivors.  I thought it would be a great opportunity to see it's a field or work I would like to pursue.  The conference began with an appearance from a guest speaker, Ethan Zohn.  He's that guy that won Survivor: Africa and then got cancer.  I haven't really followed Survivor so I was only kind of familiar with him.  He was a great speaker though and seemed really genuine.  But after that I really didn't care and lost all attention, which made me feel bad.

I spent the rest of the day listening to boring information about clinical trials and steering committee updates.  I was also surrounded by so many passionate cancer survivors that have made their experience their full-time job, but somehow I was not inspired.  It really bothered me that I wasn't feeling motivated or inspired by it all.  It made me feel like somehow there was something wrong with me because I did not have the desire to dedicate my life to cancer.

But after ruminating on it for the next couple of days (and having breakfast with one of my camp friends) I realized I don't have to care.  I guess my feeling is that, yes cancer is horrible and we can all agree on that.  And I think it's important that there are people out there advocating for cancer.  But I would much rather dedicate my life to fixing social problems.  Problems that are caused by people or systems, not just fate and environmental causes. 

So I guess it was a good thing I went to the conference, even if it wasn't for the reasons I had originally anticipated. 

 
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