As if I was a spacecraft returning to Earth’s atmosphere. Expanding insights into illness narratives and childhood cancer through evocative autoethnography

Abstract

Today, a majority of children diagnosed with cancer are expected to grow up and live—hopefully until old age. Still, knowledge of the lived experience of childhood cancer survivors is sparse. In pursuit of knowledge expansion, by combining my intersecting roles as an academic, educational counselor, and childhood cancer survivor, I approach my personal illness narrative. By means of evocative autoethnography, I write intentionally vulnerably about my experiences and make them available for consideration. I explore my narrative through archives, artifacts, memories of the past, and conversations evoked in the present. I re-visit the cultural landscape of a southern Norwegian girl growing up in the 00s with cancer. Through this, my illness narrative presents as positioned, tangled, and interwoven with a developmental trajectory. Specific educational experiences seem to linger, and many are related to being absent from or re-entering school after the onset of illness. To grasp the intersecting and conflicting experiences of being very ill while also young, I suggest Erik Erikson’s moratorium as a key concept. To complement Arthur Frank’s illness narratives of restitution, chaos, and quest, I establish the moratorium narrative. As a fresh resource, the moratorium narrative underlines the need to make sensitive our academic community’s gaze on illness trajectories unfolding in formative phases and illness narratives defined by growing up. By providing a point of recognition that prompts elaboration, this could also provide the young and very ill with a much-needed narrative space of opportunity, of which more narratives are invited and insisted upon.