Coming Home:
From Cells to Societies
Since losing my grandparents to cancer in early childhood, I have been trying to understand the disease. Throughout high school and college, I explored multi-disciplinary modes of inquiry to gain insights into tumorigenesis. In late 2023, these efforts culminated in a theory which draws on evolutionary biology, behavioral psychology, and anthropology to explain cancer as a disorder of cognition which can occur at various scales of organization in living systems.
Summary
More than just a disease of irreversibly mutated cells, cancer is a disorder of relationships between beings, emergent from a fractured perception of Self, which is ultimately rooted in trauma. Extractivism should be understood as an ecological trauma response which constantly recreates the memory of scarcity in the present. At its core, cancer is deeply lost and wants to come home. Even in its greedy, ecologically disastrous behavior, all it wants is to feel loved, to feel safe, to feel whole again, and it doesn’t know how to. Going forward, we must embody a compassion of care, even for the tumor.
