Trevor's journal: Why am I Still Here?

I think about it a lot.

Of course, I think about it a lot when I've lost so many of my good friends.

We lose people in the colorectal cancer community and, of course, the larger, the broader cancer community all the time, every day.

And it is hard, right, to think about that and to...

I do wonder, why am I still here? And some people will ask me that too.

Like, a different version of that question, you know, sort of, why are you still alive? Like, what are the...

what are the components that you think has helped you thread the needle and get through, um, when the statistics are really hard.

So, um, I, I believe, I still think it's less than 15% of stage four CRC.

So when I'm going to, I'm going to use the acronym CRC colorectal cancer, um, still less than 15% of CRC patients who are diagnosed with metastatic disease live to five years.

Um, sobering stat right so i'm going to talk about why i'm still here but before i talk about that i'm going to talk about why this episode is so hard for me to do and for that i have no notes so and even for my still alive i'm going to show it to you if you're watching this video like literally i have like less half a page of notes for this thing And that's part of the reason why I'm doing this is that I want to get back to speaking more from the heart, more of the extreme of consciousness rather than feeling like it has to be perfect or has to be planned all out.

So that type of vulnerability when you're creating content and when you're a leader, when people see you as a leader in the patient advocacy space and they see you as a leader for a nonprofit organization, sometimes you feel like you need to be perfect.

Sometimes you feel like you need to have it all together.

And, you know, even when I'm a patient and that's what, and I preach the opposite, right? Like I talk about like, it's okay that you don't have your shit together.

I do not have my shit together a bunch.

Um, I think that's human.

And I think that's especially human when you're going through a life threatening illness, whether you're the patient family.

But when you're going through that, like, you're not going to be okay sometimes.

Just the fact that I ended up somehow in leadership roles doesn't change that.

But I feel like I've kind of gotten to this mode in my career where I'm not so sure that I've felt comfortable showing all of it, even though when that's my message, right? So I think the point of this today is, And really the reason why I'm, um, doing this is to.

connect with where it started really just, and, and connect to my heart space and, and where it all began and how I feel about doing all this.

Um, so yeah, um, early on in the podcast.

So I've done like more than 90 episodes of this podcast, but, and most of that, most of the episodes are with a guest or with guests multiple.

Um, but at the beginning I used to do more of these, like where I would basically like do like a a, um, podcast diary of what was going on with my cancer and what my thoughts were on it.

And I thought, you know, just, it was basically like a, a diary of a life kind of the view from stage four was how I used to think about it.

Um, And then along the line, I think I stopped doing less of them because, again, over the past six and a half years, building Man Up To Cancer and also just being out there as a CRC advocate as well, I have something of a public recognition.