Riding the Wave

How do I cope with all the changes and the ups and downs?

It’s a question I hear again and again from the people I sit beside in cancer care. It’s not really a question about medical management. Not about stages, symptoms, or what the next scan might reveal.

It’s a question about finding your footing.

How do you stay steady when the ground beneath you keeps shifting?

If you’ve been moving through this for a while, you may have noticed something. You’re more than only coping with cancer. You’re continually adjusting your relationship to it. And the ground beneath you is never fixed.

There are moments when cancer feels like everything. It narrows your field of vision, crowds out every other thought, and contracts your entire identity into a single word: patient.

There are other moments—sometimes only minutes later—when the sky opens. You laugh, and the laugh feels yours entirely. You notice a bird outside the window. You care about something trivial.

This isn’t regression or denial. It’s the natural movement of a human being adjusting to an altered world that hasn’t settled.

You fluctuate constantly between certainty and uncertainty. Hope and fear. Control and surrender. These aren’t milestones you pass on a linear map. They’re tides. Both are always present, their proportions shifting as the weather changes.

This isn’t a problem to be solved. It’s the shape of the ride.

We’re told that the goal of coping is to find “balance.” But balance implies a static, frozen state. Yet cancer is rarely static. It ebbs and flows. Rises and falls. The reality of living alongside illness is closer to learning how to surf.

You don’t control the ocean. You don’t stop the waves from forming. You rarely see the largest swells coming until they're right on top of you.

But you can develop a different kind of stance to find equilibrium while everything under you keeps moving.

Some waves barely hiss past. Some hit like a wall. Sometimes you ride clean across the crest. Sometimes a breaker takes you under, rolls you in the dark, and spits you out.

But you come back up. You find the board. You drag yourself back onto the fiberglass, feel the water shifting beneath you, and adjust your weight for the next wave.

You don’t become someone who is immune to the ocean. You become someone familiar with riding it.

Of course, there are days you look out at the horizon and wonder why you keep paddling back out. Why you keep choosing to stand up at all.

But what other choice do you have if you want to live the life that matters to you?

Asking “How can I find equilibrium in this?” changes what you’re looking for.

You’re no longer trying to freeze the ocean. You’re no longer demanding that your mind feel only a certain way. You’re finding your equilibrium on the water.

Once you’re finding your footing, the next step becomes clear.

Sometimes the next step is to bend your knees to absorb a sudden shock. Sometimes it’s to stop paddling and float. Sometimes it’s to breathe, hold your breath, and dive under.

The work isn’t to reach a calm, dry shore and stay there forever.

The work is the movement itself. The riding, the wiping out, the adjusting, and the riding again.

How do I cope with all the changes and the ups and downs? Might that really mean how do I find my equilibrium in this?

You’re finding your line across a wave that won’t stop moving. That keeps changing shape.

You ask. You notice. You shift your weight. And you keep on going.

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Reflections on the inner psychological experience of living alongside cancer.

Jae L. Ross, PsyD, is a clinical psychologist who works with individuals and families whose lives have been reshaped by cancer, helping them navigate the emotional challenges of diagnosis, treatment, and beyond.

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