I'm...done.

At 2:36 this afternoon, I finished cancer treatment.

I would set aside a few seconds to let that sink in, but I let it sink in over a burger at Five Guys with my mom already, sooo...

It's probably the most finite ending I've ever experienced (except maybe for when I quit my job at the State Assembly. I hightailed it out of there and never looked back.) Now there's nothing holding me back from living a happy, productive life. It is a strange feeling though; what's been my reality for the past six months is now very suddenly a part (a big part) of my past. I feel airy and I feel light and I feel happy, but also kind of disoriented. What now?

There will also probably always be that tiny inkling in the back of my mind named Recurrence. When I asked my radiologist last week when I could call myself "cured," he replied with a quote by a famous oncologist on breast cancer: "You can consider yourself cured of breast cancer when you die of something else." I responded with "Jesus Christ." He then kind of backtracked and said Hodgkin's is not as severe a cancer as breast cancer is in terms of recurrence, but I probably won't ever forget that quote. As sobering a thought as it is, it's what's going to keep me vigilant about my health in the future.

Right now, I'm not so excited to get back to my life as I am to move forward and onto the kind of life I want. I want to be able to fend for myself financially, and I want to be able to do so by means of a job I really enjoy, something that fulfills me. I don't want to sit at a desk all day. I don't want to dread waking up. I don't want to wish that the hands on the clock or the pages on the calender would change faster. I spent the good part of a year wishing for that. So, as you may have read in past posts, I figured going to a head hunter would be a good way to move in that direction. Then I met Janet, the Patti Stanger of head hunters.

My friend Jason had gone to her a week before my appointment, and things hadn't gone so well. "She made me have a panic attack and I lay in bed for a day crying. Then I applied to Americorps," he said. So the night before my appointment, I tried on my interview outfit--a pretty Calvin Klein dress and a pair of heels--for my friends. "Sweater or blazer?" I asked Jenna. "Dress for the job you want--blazer," Jenna said.

The morning of the interview, I even went the extra mile (and by "extra mile" I mean "just to feel like I had some say in the style of my hair") and rubbed some mousse on top of my head. I felt beautiful, professional, and confident.

By the time I left after meeting with Janet, I felt like I was wearing this. Literally as if I had walked into her office in a black contractor bag. "I know you want a career in a creative field," she said when I told her I wanted to put my writing skills to use, "But you need to up the ante in your presentation. These companies want someone who looked like they stepped out of Vogue Magazine, not, you know... this," and she made a broad gesture up and down my person. This was all said in a thick Jersey accent. And not for nothing, you guys, but I looked good, okay? Really, I'm not lying. I did. ("Imagine if you wore the sweater?" Jenna asked later. I shudder to think.)

Janet then proceeded to tell me that there was about a 0% chance I'd be able to get a job in a field I actually wanted to work in, and that I basically shouldn't even try. As she continued to talk, any positive energy that remained in my being seeped out of my body. My spirits felt so low that I figured they had probably taken the elevator down to the basement to kill themselves. So by the time she mentioned the "amaaaazing opportunity" in reception at a fabric company, I agreed to send my resume there.

It was like I was made to feel so discouraged that working in reception at a fabric company (italics because that's the precise job I had right before I got diagnosed that I truly loathed with all my being) seemed like my only hope. It was as if the anxiety Janet instilled in me had stomped out all the memories of how many envelopes I'd stuffed and what it was like to page someone over a loudspeaker every time I had to use the bathroom. I was still in that haze when she called me a few hours later to tell me she had set up an interview for the following Monday and that she needed me to "get myself to Ann Taylor and put myself together over the weekend."

It wasn't until I was back on Long Island relaying this information to my parents when I realized the interview would be, at best, a practice interview. Because there was no way I'd be taking that job. I even debated on whether or not to go to the actual interview, but decided it would be completely irresponsible not to.

So yesterday, as I sat waiting to be interviewed, I noted how absolutely pleasant it was to go into an interview with dry palms. (To quote the late, great Janis Joplin, "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose.") I was given some paperwork to fill out, and "Please explain any gaps in your employment, excepting those concerning personal illness or disability" was the last of the blanks to fill in. Legally, I knew I had no obligation to tell the woman who was interviewing me about the Hodge, but I really feel like it's an important point to make; for one, it explains the um, seven month gap in my resume, and for another, it's a big event in my life that I learned a lot and grew as a person from. It's like, I dunno, the Peace Corps. Except...cancer.

So I told the woman who was interviewing me I had "just gotten over cancer" (just like getting over a cold!), and she was really sweet and congratulatory, and I managed to demonstrate that it had actually been a very positive experience, which she respected. On the whole, the interview went very well, so I called Janet to relay the information as I had been instructed. Perhaps I just wanted to hear one word of approval from her. But when I told her I mentioned the Hodge to the interviewer, she all but bit my head off. "WHY did you tell her that? You didn't have to, you know!" she snapped. I explained that I was well aware of my rights and briefly went into my reasons why I mentioned it, which she cut off by basically telling me I had made myself a liability.

That was Janet's third strike. The first was the entire first time I met her, essentially, and the second was telling me to go to Ann Taylor and not even Ann Taylor Loft.

I don't know where I'm going to end up. I just know where I'm not going to end up. So thanks for showing me that, Janet! Thanks for being awful and kindling a fire in me to work my tail off to find a job I can be proud of. Because I'm going to find one, and you're not going to get commission off of it.

Now that my rant is finished, I am going to help my mom put the final touches on her halloween costume and then probably enjoy a nice glass of wine. Cheers!