Guest Blog: Millennial, Survivor, Emerging Adult
Rachel McCallum is a long-term survivor diagnosed with Anaplastic Astrocytoma of the 4th ventricle of the brain stem in 1993. Her experience as a long-term survivor has encouraged her to become an advocate for others like herself who have struggled with the transition from pediatric patient to independent adulthood.
This is the ninth in a series of guest blog posts by Rachel. Catch up on her earlier posts here.
“If more legislation like the STAR Act is passed and funded, maybe future pediatric cancer survivors like me won’t have to worry about growing old before their time.”
The theory of emerging adulthood - established by Jeffrey Arnett in 2000 - fascinated me in grad school. It was particularly interesting to me, because for most of my adult life I haven’t “felt my age.” As a minor, I nearly always felt out of place, more comfortable talking with adults than my peers. I felt much more mature than others my age due to my life experiences.
Yet, at the same time, I’ve felt left behind as a young adult, particularly as an “emerging adult,” which is defined as being roughly from age 18-29. These are the years during which society expects us to become independent but goes against more recent science that suggests our brains aren’t fully developed until at least age 25. Society gives us certain adult freedoms prematurely. In America that’s usually ages 18 and 21.
I’m well into my 30’s and still feel like I’m in this developmental stage. I think that springs from my experiences as a young adult being shaped not only by the historical and social surroundings I share with my peers, but also my unique experiences as a survivor. As a survivor I have life experiences most of my peers couldn’t imagine, but my young adult life has been shaped by the same societal crises as other Millennials.
I was sitting in my high school freshman homeroom when 9/11 happened. I was working on my last year of a Bachelor of Arts degree in English when the economy crashed, and I had to deal with the fallout of the Great Recession.
During the years that followed, I tried to catch up, using resources that the California Department of Rehabilitation was able to provide and taking temporary or volunteer gigs when I could. You can read about my experience with DOR in this blog post. After nearly a decade of feeling like I’d be stuck relying on my parents and other relatives my entire life, I finally decided to go to grad school and pursue my dream of helping transition-age pediatric cancer survivors.
I wasn’t entirely sure how I wanted to accomplish this goal, but I’d been told that a degree in social work would give me plenty of options. I started on my two-year master’s in social work at USC in the fall of 2018 with a graduation date of May 2020.
Then came the pandemic. We never returned to classrooms after spring break last year. Internships were cut short, and all classes became virtual. It seemed like the entire world was standing still. Even now, we’re only beginning to imagine what going back to “normal” life will be like once the majority of Americans are vaccinated. Life has been on pause, and I have no idea what my job or career prospects will look like going forward, not that I ever did have much of an idea.
As I mentioned in my last post, ableism is inherent in the social services profession. I can only hope that the past year has taught those in the field that working from home is a fine solution for those who can’t, or don’t, drive. I understand the importance of “meeting the client where they’re at” both mentally and physically, but job descriptions for social workers often end with “must have reliable transportation and clean driving record” as if to specifically discourage people like me from applying.
Leading up to my second year of grad school, I interviewed for social work internships with several children’s hospitals in the hope of advancing my career goals, but they all ultimately turned me down. These were unpaid internships required for my degree, and I felt that my life experiences made me especially qualified. I was never given any explanation as to why I wasn’t chosen, but I suspect that ableism and the assumption that these positions would be “too fast paced” for me had something to do with the rejections.
Even in the “best of times” - if any of my adult years can be thought of as such - I was being rejected for permanent positions and given no explanation as to why. This was long before anyone saw Covid-19 coming. I couldn’t explain it. As I’ve said in previous posts, the vendors DOR sent me to were as baffled as I was. My resume, cover letter, and mock interviews were very good.
I was willing and able to take volunteer and temporary positions to prove my worth, but at the end of the day, I wanted a full-time permanent position. It seemed that every time I applied for such positions at the places I was working at, I was passed up for one of two reasons: Either there were more experienced people within the company who had been laid off during recent economic downturns, or I was simply being passed up for perceived “otherness.”
As a Millennial, I’m definitely part of a boomerang generation. However, because of my status as a survivor, my parents and I never really set guidelines as suggested in this financial article, which left me feeling aimless and depressed.
Many people my age have had to move back in with parents due to difficult economic times, not just the pandemic, but I’ve often felt like I’m always bound to bounce back in with Mom and Dad. My survivor status ensures my socioeconomic future is even less certain than that of my peers.
Just take a look at the chart shared in one of my previous posts. It reveals that 60% of survivors of pediatric tumors of the central nervous system do not achieve “complete independence” as adults and explains what markers are used to define “independence.” There is a general trend across the past few decades in which young people are getting married, having children, buying houses, and performing other markers of adulthood later than in previous generations. Survivors of pediatric cancer must try harder than most to achieve these markers at all.
Let’s not forget that as technology has drastically changed our lives over the last 50 years or so, the technology to let survivors live even semi-normal lives more than 5 or 10 years past diagnosis is also fairly new. Though I’ve had a difficult time finding an agreed-upon definition, “first generation” pediatric cancer survivors is a term that’s showed up in several articles I’ve read. In general, these appear to be the first pediatric patients to live well into adulthood, long enough to experience the long-term after-effects of their cancer and treatment. Examples of “first gen survivors” I’ve seen have included those diagnosed anywhere from the 1970s to 1990s.
As these kids (survivors like me) have been living longer, it’s taken time for health policy to catch up. Reading the descriptions of long-term effects experienced by survivors like those in this Huffington Post article from 2016, makes me nervous. It’s why I’ve spent the past decade of my life trying to figure out what might happen to me in the next. It’s also why continuing to ensure that public policy progresses at the same rate as science when it comes to long-term survivorship is so important.
The author of the article linked above pointed out that Biden’s Vice Presidential Moonshot initiative did not go far enough, because it merely mentioned “finding a cure.” Cancer is so varied in the forms it comes in and the ways in which it affects survivors of all ages that “finding a cure” becomes a vague, meaningless term.
It’s why we need organizations like Children’s Cancer Cause to continue doing the advocacy work that gets further legislation like the Childhood Cancer STAR Act passed and continually funded.
If more legislation like the STAR Act is passed and funded, maybe future pediatric cancer survivors like me won’t have to worry about growing old before their time.