Even then, I knew that while plenty of peers and adults were aware of how involved I was, there was also invisible work I wanted made visible.

So I did.

Even now, decades later, I feel embarrassed admitting the self-nomination. The first thing the critic in my head says is, Typical. Tooting your own horn.

Lately, though, I have been thinking that maybe I have kept self-publishing all these years, here on Substack for the last year and before that, on and off at amandathanks.com, because the internet may be the last place anything, or anyone, goes to die.

And when I do die, as we all will, traces of my thoughts and stories and ideas may still be sitting in the cloud, with a chance of one day raining down on relatives near or distant who never got to know me.

When I’m dead, while I believe it’s important to be honest about the missteps, questions, and impulses I acted on, I also think it is just as important, and just as vulnerable, to cite the monumental and still sometimes invisible achievements.

So, taking a note from Rindge, New Hampshire’s 1999 Youth Citizen of the Year, I have decided to name what the last year and a half has required of me.

It has only been a year and a half since melanoma entered my life, and right now I am in undetected disease status.

At this moment, no scan shows visible evidence of cancer.

That is not my doing. That is the miraculous work of modern medicine, the discipline of following medical direction as closely as possible, and whatever divine force lives in air, water, breath, and human care.

I believe attitude matters. But I do not believe anyone can think, pray, wish, or hope themselves into or out of chronic illness.

I also do not believe humility requires silence.

I did not disappear the cancer, but despite its best efforts, I also did not allow the cancer to disappear me.

Here is what I did while fighting for my life and co-parenting a teenager:

• I survived emergency brain surgery, brain radiation, and both combo and single-dose immunotherapy.

• I learned to live with adrenal insufficiency and a damaged thyroid.

• I sold my house, resulting in a 100 percent return on investment.

• I moved 40 miles away.

• I accepted help, even when it felt like it was eroding the most precious parts of my identity.

• I navigated complex insurance, medical, and financial systems.

• I spoke up when the people in charge were not listening.

• I made friends.

• I became closer with family.

• I learned to nap and say no.

• I stayed present at my son’s baseball games.

• I found my way back to movement.

• I kept writing and started to paint.

Treating this disease has left lasting damage. The key word in that sentence is: lasting.

So, while the year is not even halfway through, I am claiming Midlife Citizen of the Year, 2026.

I can’t remember what the all-hands was officially about, but I know now it was absolutely about money, because the part I remember clearly is that I was quiet and gave a shrug or some other body cue of nonchalance at the new policy. Then one of the general managers, a tall, handsome black man, spoke up.

“Sure, for some, this might be no big deal, but for the rest of us, this isn’t some way to earn some beer money. This is our lives. Our homes.”

I’m honest enough to admit I was offended. The notion that I somehow did not need this job because I was pursuing a degree.

The audacity.

My audacity.

I was too unaware then to realize that my whole “not that big a deal” posture could come across as belittling. More likely, what I took personally was simply a genuine expression of concern that had very little to do with me.

I’m certain this exchange came back to me this week because I started training to pick up a few shifts hosting at a local independent restaurant that I believe in.

And while the hours and responsibilities are a very good match for what I am trying to rebuild at this point, I would also be lying if I said it wasn’t stirring something older in me.

It has taken me a long time to understand that much of what I experience as deeply unfair, or even as an attack, often has far less to do with me than I think.

That irrational sense of rejection, or the assumption that I am an annoyance, may be one of the most destructive forces in my makeup.

I hesitate to call it personality, or even brain wiring, but whatever it is, it has shaped plenty of reactions, situations, and decisions.

The evolved position would be to stop letting it lead. But even now, I’m not always willing to catch it, and even when I do, I can lack the discipline to work it fully out of my system.

I’m not even certain it can be worked out.

Another example of how a mistake makes me feel stupid. These things showed up even though I actually ordered a car cleaning kit. The mistake was on the sender’s end, but I assumed it was mine. It took me DAYS to register for the refund.

Take even one psychology class, and you can start to identify all the things Robin Williams’s therapist character does well in that scene. But what moves me most is not the technique. It is the repetition. The refusal to let the boy deflect. The insistence, again and again, that what happened to him was not his fault, until he finally believes it enough to break.

I am not saying every cancer patient needs that exact kind of validation.

I am saying everyone deserves it.

The guilt that can come with a chronic, life-threatening diagnosis is immense. I think it may even be one of the great engines of individual advocacy. Not because advocacy is misguided, but because so many of us are trying to save someone else from the helplessness, confusion, or missed knowledge that shadowed our own diagnoses.

The advocates I know do this work because something was unclear until it was too late. One metastatic friend had no idea colon screenings were meant to begin in the early forties. Another did not know men could get breast cancer. Another, who has since died, knew the blood in his stool was not a good sign, but did not know it could mean advanced cancer.

The only other metastatic melanoma shark I know, like me, had no symptoms until the disease reached her brain.

I also turned out to be what is called MUP: melanoma of unknown primary. Doctors do not know where the melanoma on my skin began. One theory is that the original site was recognized and cleared by the immune system, but not before cells had already spread elsewhere.

MUP is rare. It also tends to respond well to immunotherapy, which seems to be true for me so far, too.

Of course, I could spend time wondering what might have happened if skin checks had started earlier, or if something had been caught somewhere along the way. Maybe the origin site would have been found. Maybe not.

The truth is, that question has lost most of its grip on me.

Because going backward is not possible. More importantly, it is no longer where I want to live.

It has taken me until today, nearly two full years into this Cancer Shark era, to know, feel, and accept that this is not my fault.

And if it ever happens to you, it will not be your fault either.

That does not mean there is nothing to learn.

May is Melanoma Awareness Month. Please make a skin check appointment with a dermatologist for yourself and for the people you love.

I love you.

My grandfather had a German Shepherd named Schatz, which I later learned means “sweetheart.” To my nine-year-old ears, though, the name meant something else entirely. It sounded sharp. Violent. Like something that pierces skin. Like a shot.

Her bark was deafening. Whenever the house was empty, Schatz was chained inside the open garage, where she lunged, growled, and barked from the moment she was clipped in. The chain gave her enough room to sit in the shade or station herself at the top of the long paved driveway. Her stance felt like a dare.

I was certain that if given the chance, she would eat me.

Which is why it felt especially cruel whenever I was the one asked to unclip her when we got home.

I do not remember protesting. I remember freezing. Standing there, staring at this loud, furious “sweetheart,” trying to calculate whether she would go for my arm first or something more ambitious.

Somehow, a few times, I managed it. I got close enough to unhook the chain, and she would tear off, either toward the yard to check on the chickens or down into the finished basement by the wood stove.

From this distance, the details of that house sound charming. The chickens. The garage. The country quiet. But Schatz swallowed most of the peace I could have found there.

For years after, dogs felt to me like creatures best admired from a distance, preferably by someone else.

The child I was would never have believed that by my mid-forties I would live with three big, loud dogs and love them so completely that I call them babies. To most people, they read as intimidating. To me, they are family.

That change matters more than I usually let it.

Too often, I look at the visible messes of my life and use them as evidence that I am still the same person I have always been. Still disorganized. Still caught in old patterns wearing slightly different clothes.

And then I remember this: I used to be terrified to unclip one dog from a chain.

Now I share my home, and my heart, with three of them.

Of course, I’ve changed.

Hopefully, I’ll never stop.

They don’t look so intimidating when they’re in a puppy pile, but the mailman definitely doesn’t find them to be this angelic.

My mother and two of my sisters were in the room. There may have been others. I know I must have asked a lot of questions, but I cannot remember most of them now.

What I do remember is him saying, “I’ve done hundreds of these. This will be fun, I promise.”

I remember giving something slightly snarky back about how it would probably be more fun for him than for me.

He agreed.

After that, my memory narrows. Whether everyone else had left or my mind has simply edited the scene down to the two of us, I cannot say. I remember a cool room, dim light, a lot of blue. Mostly, I remember what I said next.

“You mentioned cutting along my hairline, so no one will ever really see the scar, and that’s great, but I need you to know something. I can’t lose my creativity. If I can’t write or perform or tell stories, I don’t know who I’ll be. I don’t even know if I’ll like her.”

He told me the surgery was happening in a completely different part of the brain than wherever my creativity lived. He said that if someone could choose where to have a brain tumor, they should choose exactly where mine was.

Obviously, I had nothing to do with where it landed. But the way he said it made me feel less like a case and more like a collaborator. Suddenly, this was not just happening to me. We were doing it together.

Then he said, “I have a strong feeling we’re going to be friends for a long time.”

That line gave me more hope than I had felt since racing to the hospital, vomiting because the tumor was pressing where it should not have been.

Later, in recovery, after telling me everything had gone perfectly, he added, “There’s no doubt you make work fun.”

I tried not to laugh, but I cried a little instead.

Making work fun had mattered to me for as long as I could remember. And in that moment, what he gave back to me was not just confidence in the surgery. It was the sense that even here, even like this, even with so much ahead, I was still me.

In case you can’t tell, YES, that’s a shark’s tooth, with a heart hanging from my neck.

Once I finally ripped it open and saw the first words, “We’re sorry...,” I knew I was right. I was devastated. Furious too. Furious enough to call the admissions office and ask, essentially, how they could have made such an obvious mistake.

I was sure they wanted me.

They didn’t.

I remember feeling certain that this meant I would never get out of my hometown, which was dramatic considering I had applied to two other schools and had not heard back yet. Still, that is how rejection works when identity gets involved. It does not stay contained. It spreads.

Maybe Maryland’s no is what pushed me to walk on to Sacred Heart’s Division I field hockey team. Maryland was elite. Once they passed, I gave up any fantasy of belonging anywhere near that program except in the stands. So I turned the rejection into a private training mission. If they were not going to tell me I was a field hockey player, I would prove it myself.

Turns out, I was.

That has been one of the central tensions of my life: what to do when the parts of me I most want confirmed are not fully in my control.

Lately, I have been trying to loosen my grip on that whole pattern. To stop approaching everything through the ache of exceeding expectations and instead show up without immediately ranking myself.

This is almost impossible for me to do with writing.

I identify too deeply as a writer and storyteller. Word choice matters to me. Tempo matters. Scene, point of view, rhythm, revision. I do not spill things out and call them done. Even these pieces are worked and reworked before I post them. That does not mean they are flawless. It means I care.

So when I tried to think of a creative practice I could enter without needing to be good at it, I got stuck. Then I remembered all the paint left over from when Briggs was little and I wanted him to experiment.

I am not a painter. I have never taken a class. I have not studied technique. I did not even have canvases, only a few hundred blank, cardboard-like cards that looked usable enough.

I also hate washing brushes. So I decided to use whatever I wanted: paper towels, my hands, aluminum foil, parchment paper, plastic bags, burned-down incense, plastic bottles.

Now I spend a few minutes most days painting small pictures. Some days, like yesterday, I make more than one.

It still feels unnatural not to judge what I have made. But in giving myself permission to do something that does not have to rank, or earn, or justify itself, I can feel something in me loosening.

I have beaten myself up for as long as I can remember. Now I put the paintings on the wall as soon as they are dry.

I am an artist. It has taken me 45 years to say that without negotiation.

I am proud of myself.

One of the daily pieces. Todd thought it was “dark,” I think it’s cheerful. What do you think?

On sunny mornings, the light came through like a spotlight, crossing my toes and spilling onto the floor exactly where one small hop would place me inside it.

I had a very clear belief then: the sun was shining on me on purpose.

Not because it was mine, but because we belonged to each other in some private way. The spotlight and I were partners. Maybe soulmates.

That confidence usually lasted until I left my room. Then it would slowly erode over the course of a day spent among other people. On sunny mornings, I felt restored. On overcast ones, it was harder to believe I had ever been chosen in the first place.

Looking back, it is easy enough to see that attention has always fueled me. So has the feeling of being chosen for something. Stage, radio, television, writing, storytelling, leadership. None of that surprises me now. What surprises me is how early I began trying to prove that my ache for those things was not vanity, but destiny.

I tried in all the usual ways. Excellent grades. Constant participation. Kindness, even toward people who were cruel. Beauty, or my best approximation of whatever beauty meant at the time. Admiration at school, at work, in crisis, in love. I wanted proof that the light had not misled me.

What I built instead was a blinding scoreboard.

How many people liked me, really liked me?
Were my grades merit or personality?
Why was I chosen?
How much money?
How pretty?
How thin?
How much had I really accomplished?

No matter how I totaled it, I always came up short.

Over time, that internal tallying became its own kind of violence. Presenting. Performing. Evaluating. Condemning. Judging.

When the light failed me, I went looking for other proofs.

So last week, when I walked into my psychiatry appointment after the last 18 months and said, “I’m mediocre,” it did not feel dramatic. It felt like the meanest truth I could muster.

My psychiatrist is brilliant, so she did not try to argue with me in ways I could easily bat away. But I did get her to swear for the first time, and somehow that helped.

Afterward, I drove to Billerica to pick up Briggs. The plan was just to see him for a bit, but he had the next day off from school, so he came back to Bridgewater with me for the weekend.

On the long drive home, the sun finally came out. Just for a little while before it went down.

It found me again, with my son riding along, and for the first time, I think, I finally gave myself a W for something I had always ranked as the bare minimum: showing up.

Clearly, this is not Massachusetts in the early spring, but it’s the prettiest picture of the sun I have. And she deserves to be showcased.

“Will I ever care about my breasts hanging out again?”

I was exhausted and sad. Briggs was so tiny that most of his calories came through a tube threaded through his nose. The milk in the tube was breast milk fortified with formula, every calorie optimized.

I mostly pumped, not because I did not want to nurse, but because at first he was too little to do what full-term babies are meant to do: suck, breathe, swallow. It is a complex brain function that develops in the last stretch of pregnancy. We did not get that far.

For months, the feeding tube did most of the work. Then, slowly, we moved to breast and bottle.

In the meantime, I was topless every three hours, around the clock. It was easiest to pump in the hospital, where I could smell him, see him in the incubator, and trick my body into cooperating.

It also seemed that no matter how carefully I timed it, someone was always walking in just as I was taking off my shirt or putting it back on. A doctor. A nurse. An orderly. A visitor from the other baby’s family.

I remember saying something like, “At this point, the entire Patriots team could walk through, and I would not even flinch.”

The nurse laughed and told me my modesty would come back.

I told her that before Briggs, I had worn a two-piece bathing suit exactly once in my life. I could not wait to be done with this part.

She was right. My modesty came back. And once it did, it stayed. Since then, I have always noticed whether I was covered.

What has been harder to recover is any instinct for how to be kind to myself when my suffering is not in service of Briggs.

Motherhood asks a lot of me. It keeps rearranging my life, my body, my priorities, my sense of who matters most. But with him, even the hardest versions of myself have always felt usable. Necessary, even. For my son, I can almost always find some reserve of strength, resolve, comfort, or guidance.

For myself, I am far less merciful.

I am angry at the fatigue that lives with me now. Angry that I cannot simply override it. Angry that I can still get up, still move, still do things, and so often do not want to. That’s the part I judge most harshly. Before all this, I wanted to do nearly everything, or at least try. Now, more than anything, I want to rest. Sleep.

Sleep feels like surrender. It feels lazy, wasteful, almost ungrateful, even though I know that what is truly wasteful is the amount of time I spend judging myself for needing it. The judgment changes nothing. It helps no one. I still return to it.

That, more than the fatigue itself, is what wears me down.

I do not want to go away. I do not want my life to be over. But I do want some more familiar version of myself to return, and the longer I live with this diagnosis, the less convinced I am that she is coming back intact.

I would rather try to become who I was. Instead, I am left to learn how to live with who I am.

I think about who I once was, how little patience she had for wasted talent, unfinished things, a life not fully used. I can hear her asking me the cruelest possible version of the question: So what did you actually do?

She is not right just because I can hear her clearly.

But she is still loud enough to hurt.

Briggs was just the sweetest little thing ever…even at 2lbs.

There was a stretch of years when I raised money for a nonprofit focused on trauma-informed care for educators, social workers, and health care workers. A handful of donor names kept surfacing, and one stood out more than t…

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1. My son, Briggs, used to play street pickleball with me in front of our house in Andover. By “play,” I mean we batted a pickleball back and forth in the street and made up our own rules.

2. The old me never officially played. I have a hard time returning to things I did before becoming a Cancer Shark. Writing is one of …

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I excel at hiding my mediocrity.

In high school, I played varsity field hockey all four years, which sounds impressive until I tell the whole truth: the school had just launched girls’ soccer, and not …

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Last night was fun, in the way being a Patriots fan during the biggest games always is. I spent my childhood never feeling moments like that, then much of my twenties expecting them, and then, sadly, another drought.

Then came…

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It was a success. A room full of artists, storytellers, and people willing to sit together and listen. Good food. Real stories. The kind of night that reminds you why gathering still matters.

Everything came out of the kitchen Chef Todd Winer bu…

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I know what failing systems look like. More importantly, I know what they feel like inside a human body. Once you have that knowledge, it becomes impossible not to recognize when a system is breaking down in real time.

This space is…

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The immunotherapy is working.

The proof is on the scan and in the heat pad currently wrapped around my shoulder. This round, the side effects are exhaustion and joint pain. I am told the pain mimics arthritis. What it actually feels like is a lingering ache that settles in and dulls e…

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Since becoming a Cancer Shark, I have been encouraging people, both in person and…

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But today was different.

Today was my first dermatology skin check, and I was far more nervous than I expected to be. I knew exactly why.

In my head, I was running a familia…

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It had to be Edgar B. Herwick III.

Edgar and I became friends sometime around 2007, I think. It feels impossible to pin down the exact date, without contacting GBH HR, because we have both lived about…

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