“Healing isn’t a competition.”
One of the hardest emotional lessons I had to learn after surviving a brain tumour was that recovery doesn’t follow the same timeline for everyone.
For a long time, I compared myself to other people constantly.
People who seemed to recover faster.
People who looked more confident.
People who appeared to move on with life more easily after illness or surgery.
Meanwhile, I often felt exhausted, overwhelmed and emotionally lost.
At times, it made me feel like I was somehow failing at recovery.
Especially because recovery after brain surgery is rarely straightforward.
Some days I felt positive and hopeful.
Other days, even basic things felt emotionally or physically exhausting.
And honestly?
That inconsistency frustrated me more than I can explain.
“I wish I had shown myself more compassion.”
I kept wondering:
Why am I not coping better?
Why do I still feel anxious?
Why does everything seem harder for me than it does for other people?
But over time, I slowly started realising something important.
Recovery is deeply personal.
Not just physically.
Emotionally too.
Every brain tumour journey is different.
Every surgery is different.
Every person carries trauma differently.
And social media can sometimes make that comparison even harder.
You see people smiling.
Travelling.
Working.
Living life again.
But what you don’t always see are:
- the difficult days
- the panic
- the fatigue
- the grief
- the setbacks happening privately behind the scenes
One of the biggest turning points in my own recovery came when I stopped measuring my healing against somebody else’s timeline.
Because healing isn’t a competition.
There is no “perfect” way to recover after surviving something life-changing.
Some people rebuild quickly.
Others take years.
Most of us quietly move between strength and struggle more often than we admit.
Looking back now, 18 years after brain surgery, I wish I had shown myself more compassion during those difficult years.
Because surviving a brain tumour already places enough pressure on you without adding comparison on top of it.
One of the biggest things I’ve learnt is that recovery deserves patience.
Even when progress feels slow.
Even when healing looks different from what you expected.
And even when your journey doesn’t look like anybody else’s.
Tomorrow I’ll be sharing another lesson from the last 18 years of surviving, recovering and rebuilding life after a brain tumour.
A Brain Tumour’s Travel Tale: Cards on the Table, I Pooed Myself
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