Finding Strength to Heal

Therapy was taboo in our household, and I think it is for a lot of Hispanics. The minute you hear therapy, you think, "Estar locos." I'm Wendy, and this is how therapy changed my life. I grew up in East L.A. My whole entire life was shaped by my culture. I'm Latina, I'm Mexican American, and my parents are immigrants from Mexico. So growing up was very, like, a tight community with my family and also my relatives in Mexico. In June of 2020, I was diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma, which is a blood cancer, and it completely turned my life around. Yesterday I got my results, and I found out I have cancer. I couldn't see a doctor because COVID, and my oncologist kept pushing back my appointment dates, and I was just getting sicker and sicker. I was slowly just dying. Like, this whole entire thing is just so painful, and I felt like it just grew overnight. My aunt, who had survived breast cancer, referred us to her oncologist in Guadalajara. I was so scared having to go to a different country and now fight for my life. I had to stay in Mexico for a year. My mom went with me to Guadalajara to get treatment, and she was there with me for a few days, and it was nice. I felt like I had a great support system. Then life kicks in, right? Everyone goes back to their routine. I would've loved for my family to also be there to call, go to appointments with me, clean, cook, just spend time with me, I guess. No one really checked up on me, but I was too busy fighting for my life to realize it. I'm just tired of feeling pain and feeling alone. I ended up coming back to L.A. in 2021 to get more extensive treatment. It came to a point where I just felt like I really needed my family. I had a lot of talks with them about what I needed. I was in the same country as them. Like, why aren't they there for me? This abandonment was too hard to bear on my own, so I had to seek therapy, and I did. I got to a place in therapy where I knew I had to just solely focus on myself, and the healthiest thing for me at the moment was to cut my family off, so I went almost a year in treatment without talking to my family. I think that's ultimately what got me to a strong place. I've never been through a situation like this from growing up with a family that's just so close to now, not even speaking to them and them not even knowing if I'm alive. It's just so, it's so hard, and I don't know what to do to help. Through therapy, I was able to realize that it wasn't that my family didn't love me. It was the fact that they...