This is the 6th in an ongoing series of posts bringing a critical sociological and feminist lens to my own experiences with endometrial cancer. (Note: The title of this post is a reference to the Doors’ song “People Are Strange When You’re a Stranger.” Give it a listen!)

Paul Stoller’s book Stranger in the Village of the Sick: A Memoir of Cancer, Sorcery, and Healing has bounced around in my head ever since receiving my diagnosis of endometrial cancer back in May 2025. I’ll return to sorcery in a future post, but the bit that draws me in right now is the idea of being a stranger.

Like Stoller, I entered the village of the sick as a healthy person whose anthropological training gifted me – or possibly cursed me — with a critical eye for analyzing the social interactions and cultural norms of my new village. I mused about how “cancer time” differs from time in the outside world, about how words have different meanings in cancer land, about the unfamiliar clothing practices, bodily gestures and facial expressions, about the rules and hierarchies of cancer land, about the social construction of one’s identity as “cancer patient” – an identity that elides one’s former identities (just in case you don’t know or have forgotten – and I really need to say this — for me that includes mother, professor, social justice activist, mosaic artist, nature lover, writer, community member), and about how I just didn’t fit into cancer land.

And then something unexpected happened. Less than four months into my sojourn in the village of the sick, I no longer feel like a full-fledged citizen of the outside world. It’s not just that I need to avoid public events because my immune system is wrecked by chemotherapy. Or that fatigue forces me out of social gatherings (even ones I most looked forward to, that is, my son’s engagement party). Or that I need a doctor’s note to persuade my university that I need “accommodations” so that I can continue teaching (apparently my word, even after decades of being a faithful faculty member, is not sufficient). Nor is it just my slow gait, bald head, pale complexion, and volatile emotions. It is indeed all of that, but what I’m thinking about today is how quickly I have come to feel that I have become a stranger in the village of the healthy (a.k.a., the “outside” or “real” world).

I can’t pinpoint exactly when that happened. Maybe it was when I listened to friends talk about their plans to travel to Europe, or national parks, or Alaska, or Maine and it all sounded so foreign to me (both the travel and the future-planning). My only plan was for a trip to the hospital for a follow-up CT scan the next day but mentioning that seemed like a conversational faux pas. Maybe it was when I noticed my need to remind listeners that I used to be a person of significance, even at the risk of sounding like that caricature of an old British soldier in Agatha Christie novels who bores everyone with stories of his heroics during the Boer War. (Note: No one even remembers the Boer War, and in any case, that old soldier has been a pathetic, irrelevant doddering old fool for ages). Maybe it was when I realized that I was no longer being asked to help out or pitch in or contribute to the common good. (Note: For me, the highlight of my son’s engagement party came when the guests had gone, everyone else was wiped out from hosting, but due to my mid-party nap I had the energy to clean up; that is, prove that I have still useful “real world” experience and skills to contribute.) (Further note: Oh the joy I felt when my son and his fiancé came into the living room and exclaimed, “No one would even know that there were 35 people here less than an hour ago!”)

Or maybe it was when I began to respond more quickly to phone calls and emails from members of my endometrial cancer support group than to messages from my “real world” friends. Or when I noticed that the only time I really laugh is when chatting with other residents of the village of the sick.

Was it only a few weeks ago that I felt like an imposter in cancer land? “Hey, I don’t really belong here. I’m just passing through. My real life is on the outside.” Was it really just a month ago that I wrote about resisting the commodification of cancer and choosing to flaunt my bald head rather than spend money on wigs and hats. But that was before the weather turned cold(ish) and, like a newborn baby, too much body heat was escaping through my scalp. And now, this is my truth: Currently, and probably for the rest of my life, being a cancer patient is how others see me and the lens through which I see the world.

Don’t get me wrong. I have not (yet) received full citizenship in the village of the sick. As of this writing, I am a stranger in both worlds. I’m hanging in the middle. A refugee without a passport. A woman without a country. Stuck in a liminal status in which I look and sound healthy a great deal of the time (or at least that’s what people tell me) and even feel well some of the time (on a three week chemotherapy cycle there are some good days), but always aware that cancer cells are lurking inside my chemo filled body – that in a fundamental way I am different from my colleagues, friends, and even my closest family. I have a foot in each world, which, on occasion, allows extraordinary insights into each of those worlds but more often leaves me feeling like I’m trying to straddle a wall that is so high and so thick that I’ll surely split in half if I must keep trying. Which, of course, I must do.

Which brings me back to the stranger. The stranger, as I see it, challenges binaries. The stranger is neither friend nor enemy, neither wholly “other” yet not “one of us”. Sociologists (especially Jewish sociologists) have long been intrigued by the figure of the stranger – the one who moves between worlds but belongs to none. For Georg Simmel and Zygmunt Bauman the stranger is often valued for the objectivity that he [sic] offers to the individual and society. The fresh eyes, the ability to see beyond what is normally taken for granted, the sense that he can be trusted with personal confidences and confessions because he [sic] doesn’t belong to or owe allegiance to any particular group, isn’t beholden to any particular master. And perhaps that is what drives me to write these essays: Even as the ways in which I used to help my family, community and society are no longer feasible, I can – as a stranger – offer insights, different ways of seeing the world, perhaps even serve as a repository for confidences and confessions that are considered taboo, or uncomfortable, or TMI in the “real world.”

Lest all this sounds too rosy, however, both Simmel and Bauman placed far more emphasis on the negative aspects of stranger-ness: Because they cannot be controlled or ordered, strangers are always objects of fear, a constant and existential threat. And while I doubt anyone sees me – Susan — as a imminent threat, I am all-too-aware that as a carrier – an embodiment – an avatar of cancer, I represent that which we all wish to keep hidden: the knowledge that our bodies already, from the moment of conception, harbor the seeds of our eventual death.

But that is the topic of an essay I don’t yet wish or need to write. For now, my mission is to embrace my stranger-ness, see what I can learn from my newly acquired cultural perches, try to translate (mediate) on behalf of citizens of both villages, and strive to cultivate kindness and compassion for those who are sick as well as for those who are healthy.

P.S. Being a stranger is exhausting.