“I am neither woman nor threat. Just something they don’t know how to categorize,” writes general practitioner and breast cancer survivor Katherine Zippel in the essay “Body of Evidence” (Intima, Spring/Summer 2025), an intimate reflection of a demoralizing airport security search of her prosthetic breasts. Living with metastatic breast cancer, I feel the agony of this statement and have often felt “neither woman nor threat” and uncategorizable.

Though I know at some point my situation will be different, for now my disease is invisible. I dance, practice yoga, walk, parent my children, show up at school events, go on dates with my husband, and enjoy a glass of wine. I have not lost my hair. So when I tell people that I will be in treatment for the rest of my life and that every five weeks, I receive an Enhertu infusion, which flattens me for a week, they are incredulous. “But you look so healthy,” they say. “But you don’t seem like you have cancer,” they say. It's always an odd and destabilizing moment when I must confirm my reality for someone else. I don’t fit neatly into a box.

“It’s true,” I want to scream, but I get it. My own feelings are conflicted. On one hand, I do not want to be categorized only as a cancer patient, yet on the other, living with metastatic breast cancer is an important part of my identity. It is my life. Over the years, I have learned to live in a both/and psychic space, a place of affirmation and possibility that allows me to live two truths at once. [Note: Burkholder’s essay “Disambiguation” movingly chronicles Burkholder’s life experience.]

At the end of “Body of Evidence,” Zippel hears her husband’s voice in her head: The wind is always moving because it has somewhere to go. For her, these words “remind me that I am still here, still standing.”

“Thank you, Katherine,” I say aloud. Thank you for affirming what I know is true: Being alive is both heartbreakingly messy and wondrously brimming with joy.