I Spent Years Showing Up for Everyone While Quietly Fighting for My Own Life

I Spent Years Showing Up for Everyone While Quietly Fighting for My Own Life

Sometimes healing isn’t learning how to survive. Sometimes it’s finally allowing the people who love you to help you live.

By Bayek Stephoñe Braswell

On September 25, 2025, I made a Facebook post that was only a few words long:

“A mass was found on my kidney. So dealing with that.”

That was it.

A few words.

Looking at that memory exactly one year later, though, there is so much behind those words that nobody reading that post could have possibly known.

I remember that day like it was yesterday.

And what most people didn’t know was that by the time doctors found that mass, I had already spent a couple of years silently battling leukemia.

Yes.

Silently.

I didn’t tell people while I was going through it.

I didn’t make announcements.

I didn’t post every appointment.

I didn’t tell everybody when I was scared.

I didn’t tell people about the days I was so sick I was puking everywhere.

I didn’t tell them about being exhausted.

I didn’t tell them about barely being able to make it to appointments.

I didn’t tell them about the times I didn’t have food, didn’t have medicine, or didn’t know how the hell I was going to get where I needed to go.

And I know somebody reading this might immediately ask:

“Why wouldn’t you tell anybody?”

That question has an answer.

It’s just not a simple one.

Why Would I Tell People Who Never Asked?

Maybe keeping leukemia to myself wasn’t the healthiest decision.

Maybe there were people who would have helped if they had known.

I understand that today in a way I probably couldn’t understand it then.

People cannot respond to something they genuinely don’t know is happening.

But there was another side to it.

I had spent so much of my life feeling like people only contacted me when they wanted something that eventually I stopped believing people would show up simply because I needed them.

That distinction matters.

It wasn’t:

“Nobody knows I have leukemia, so why aren’t they helping me fight leukemia?”

It was:

“Nobody even asks how I’m doing, so why would I trust them with the fact that I’m fighting for my life?”

There were days when I was absolutely sick.

Puking.

Exhausted.

Hurting.

Barely functioning.

And somehow, I would still make time to check on everybody else.

That sounds crazy when I write it now.

I could barely show up for myself, but somehow I was still worried about whether everybody else was okay.

That has been one of the biggest patterns of my life.

Who needs me?

Who needs help?

Who needs somebody to listen?

Who needs something I have?

And somewhere in all those questions, I forgot to ask:

What does Bayek need?

Sometimes You Don’t Want to Be Rescued. You Just Want to Be Noticed.

This is something I’ve only recently been able to put into words.

I don’t think I was walking around expecting somebody to magically save me.

I didn’t expect anybody to fix everything.

Hell, anybody who knows me knows how difficult it can be for me to ask for help in the first place.

I think I just wanted somebody to notice.

Just once.

Sit beside me.

Look at me.

And ask:

“What’s going on with you?”

Not because they needed money.

Not because they needed advice.

Not because they needed a favor.

Not because they needed me to build something, fix something, solve something or provide something.

Just because they cared about me.

There is a difference between being needed and being loved.

I’m learning that now.

For a long time, I think I confused the two.

My Grandfather, Cancer and a Sentence I Haven’t Forgotten

This part is difficult.

My grandfather recently passed away from cancer.

I loved my grandfather.

And while he was going through his own struggles, I checked on him constantly.

What makes that complicated emotionally is knowing what I was dealing with during parts of my own life while still trying to show up for everybody else.

My grandparents didn’t know I was battling leukemia because I never told them.

I have to acknowledge that.

But there were also days when I was laid out on the floor sick and nobody stopped to ask what was happening with me.

Nobody asked why I wasn’t myself.

Nobody asked if I needed help.

And later, while cancer was once again part of my own life, I had to hear that I wasn’t trying to help enough.

That hurt.

It still hurts.

Because something inside me immediately screamed:

YOU never tried to help ME.

That doesn’t mean I didn’t love my grandfather.

Grief and anger can exist in the same body.

Love and disappointment can exist at the same time.

Missing somebody doesn’t erase everything that happened while they were alive.

And being hurt by somebody doesn’t mean there wasn’t love there.

Human relationships are complicated as hell.

Cancer doesn’t magically make them simple.

Death doesn’t magically erase everything unresolved either.

So when I heard that I hadn’t done enough, my mind went back through years of memories.

Who noticed when I was falling apart?

Who wondered why I was sick?

Who asked why I disappeared?

Who asked whether I had food?

Who asked whether I had medicine?

Who asked whether I could make it to my appointments?

Who simply asked:

“Are YOU okay?”

And this feeling wasn’t limited to one side of my family.

I have felt it from both.

I Learned Early What Giving Everything to Family Could Cost You

A lot of how I operate today goes back to what I witnessed growing up.

My mother has always been the type of person who would give somebody the shirt off her back.

I watched our home become a place for relatives who needed somewhere to go.

I watched her help people.

I watched her try to connect family.

I watched her try to make sure family was around me as a child.

And then I watched some of those same people shit on her.

People saw what she gave.

I saw what happened afterward.

I saw the tears.

I saw the pain.

I saw what being disappointed by people she loved did to her.

Those experiences teach a child something whether anybody intends them to or not.

And then I grew up and experienced my own betrayals.

I’ve even had relatives try to set me up to be robbed.

So when people wonder why I can keep someone at arm’s length, there’s your answer.

Somewhere along the way, closeness became something my brain learned to examine before trusting.

When somebody gets close to me, there’s a question running in the background:

Do you actually love me?

Or…

What do you want from me?

People Usually Hear Me When I’ve Already Had Enough

I know I’m misunderstood.

I know that.

People sometimes see me speaking loudly about something and assume that moment tells them everything they need to know about me.

What they don’t see is everything that happened before I finally opened my mouth.

I don’t speak often when I’m hurting.

I internalize.

I analyze.

I disappear into myself.

I put distance between myself and other people.

I keep going.

And I keep going.

And I keep going.

Until eventually…

I’ve had enough.

Then people hear me.

And sometimes they judge the explosion without ever asking what caused the pressure.

That doesn’t mean every reaction I have is automatically right.

It means there is usually a story behind it.

Sometimes I wish people who have decided they understand me would simply sit beside me and ask:

“Bayek, what’s actually going on?”

You might meet an entirely different person than the one you created in your head.

Then, Somehow, I Walked Into a Church

And this is where the story started changing.

If you know me personally, you probably know that my relationship with God and church has been complicated throughout my life.

Very complicated.

There have been questions.

There has been anger.

There has been distance.

There have been experiences that made me reluctant to trust religious spaces just like other experiences made me reluctant to trust people.

So the fact that about a year ago I walked into a church at all meant something.

And then something happened that I wasn’t expecting.

I stayed.

Eventually, I did something that carries a tremendous amount of meaning considering that history.

I got baptized.

And two people in particular became an important part of that chapter for me:

Pastor Dr. Lonnie Anderson Jr. and Yvette Breckenridge.

From DAY ONE, they showed me something that sounds incredibly simple but hit me much deeper than I think either of them could have realized.

They showed me:

Hey. You belong somewhere.

I didn’t have to walk through those doors pretending my entire life was perfect.

I didn’t have to have every question answered.

I didn't have to erase everything that had happened before I got there.

I didn’t have to prove my usefulness first.

There was space for me.

That experience started something internally that had very little to do with simply attending church.

It made me start examining relationships.

Maybe Love Was Already Around Me and I Didn’t Know How to Receive It

Something changed in the way I started looking at people.

Instead of only looking for who was going to hurt me next, I started noticing the people who had already been showing me love.

And there aren't many.

I'm not going to pretend suddenly there's this enormous circle around me.

There isn't.

It's a very, very small select few.

They know who they are.

And I hope they understand how grateful I am for them.

Some of the people I consider family aren't related to me at all.

People call me family and we don't share blood.

People call me their son and I'm not their biological son.

People have shown up for me during times when I wouldn't even show up for myself.

And perhaps one of the biggest things I'm learning now is how to stop questioning every act of genuine love long enough to actually receive it.

Because when you've spent years asking:

“What do you want from me?”

It can be difficult to recognize someone whose answer is:

“Nothing. I just love you.”

At 33 Years Old, I Finally Said Something to My Mother

This one might sound strange to some people.

But considering everything I've written above, maybe it won't.

At 33 years old, I recently started allowing myself to tell my mother something that should probably be easy for a son to say:

“Hey… I'd actually like to let you be someone close to me.”

My own mama.

The woman who raised me.

The woman whose pain I watched growing up.

And even there, I had walls.

That's how deep some of this shit goes.

Sometimes the walls we build to keep the wrong people out become so strong that the right people can't get through either.

I'm starting to understand that.

And I'm trying to change it.

Not overnight.

Not by pretending decades of experiences never happened.

But one relationship at a time.

I Still Can't Watch People Go Without

Here's the crazy part.

After everything I've experienced, I still haven't figured out how to stop caring about people.

Sometimes I almost wish I could.

But that's just not me.

I can't stand watching somebody go without.

I can't stand seeing somebody bullied.

I can't stand watching somebody hurt when I know I can do something.

I've put myself in detrimental situations because somebody else needed help.

I've sacrificed things I probably shouldn't have sacrificed.

I've stretched myself beyond what I had available.

I've shown up when I was exhausted.

I've smiled when I was hurting.

I did it while silently fighting leukemia.

And now, while dealing with kidney cancer, I still catch myself doing the exact same thing.

“Are you okay?”

“Do you need anything?”

“How can I help?”

Sometimes I'm asking those questions while my own world is on fire.

That's who I am.

But I'm realizing something:

Caring about everybody else shouldn't require abandoning myself.

Maybe Strength Isn't Doing Everything Alone

For years, strength meant surviving.

Handle it.

Figure it out.

Don't bother anybody.

Don't ask for anything.

Find a way.

Keep moving.

Smile.

Help somebody else.

Repeat.

But maybe that's not the only definition of strength.

Maybe strength is also telling somebody:

“I'm not okay today.”

Maybe strength is answering the phone when somebody is checking on you instead of automatically saying everything is fine.

Maybe strength is allowing somebody to help.

Maybe strength is trusting somebody enough to tell them you're scared.

Maybe strength is admitting that you actually want connection.

Because I do.

I want relationships.

I want emotional connection.

I want family.

I want community.

I want people around me.

The difficult part is figuring out how to stop looking at every extended hand and wondering whether the other one is reaching into my pocket.

I'm working on that.

Blood Doesn't Automatically Make Someone Family

This past year has forced me to redefine that word.

Family.

DNA can make us relatives.

History can connect us.

A last name can connect us.

But I'm learning that family is also something people do.

Family checks on you when they don't need anything.

Family notices when something isn't right.

Family celebrates you without secretly competing with you.

Family can sit beside you without requiring you to perform.

Family makes space.

Family says:

“You belong here.”

And sometimes the person doing that doesn't share a drop of your blood.

Sometimes they're the people you meet later in life.

Sometimes they're people at church.

Sometimes they're friends.

Sometimes they're mentors.

Sometimes they're the people who choose you.

And sometimes healing means looking back at someone who has been trying to love you for years and finally saying:

“Okay. I'm going to stop fighting you and let you.”

One Year Later

So here I am.

September 25, 2026.

Looking at a Facebook memory from exactly one year ago.

“A mass was found on my kidney. So dealing with that.”

Five words at the end.

So dealing with that.

It's almost funny seeing how casually I wrote it.

Because behind those words was a man carrying years of shit nobody could see.

A man who had already silently battled leukemia.

A man who had learned to survive without expecting anybody to come looking for him.

A man who could be sick as hell and somehow still ask everybody else whether they were okay.

A man carrying anger toward family.

A man carrying things from childhood.

A man who had watched his mother get hurt by people she loved.

A man who wanted connection while simultaneously being terrified of what people might do once he gave them access to him.

But something else was happening around that same period of my life.

I walked into a church.

I found people who made room for me.

I got baptized.

I started examining relationships differently.

I started noticing the people who genuinely loved me.

I started reconsidering what family meant.

And eventually I even started opening a door I'd kept partly closed between myself and my own mother.

So no, I'm not writing this as somebody who has everything figured out.

I don't.

I'm still angry about some things.

I'm still grieving.

I'm still learning.

I'm still fighting cancer.

I'm still learning how to ask for help.

I'm still learning how to trust love without immediately searching for the hidden price tag attached to it.

And I'm still probably going to try helping somebody when I should be sitting my ass down somewhere taking care of myself.

😂

That's Bayek.

But I'm trying.

If Cancer Ever Takes Me

I've thought about death more than I probably ever wanted to.

Cancer does that.

So yes, I've thought:

What happens if cancer eventually takes me?

And if that day ever comes, I don't want people reducing my story to the illnesses I fought.

I don't want the headline of my life to be:

He suffered.

Nah.

If you remember anything about me, remember this:

Life gave me plenty of reasons to become cold.

I saw people I loved get hurt.

I've been betrayed.

I've been used.

I've been misunderstood.

I've felt forgotten.

I've been sick while taking care of everybody except myself.

I've fought for my life quietly.

And somehow, through all of it, life never managed to convince me that I should stop caring about other people.

That's the part I'm proud of.

But perhaps this next chapter isn't about proving how much pain I can survive.

I've already proven that shit enough.

Maybe this chapter is about learning that the person who spends so much time making sure everybody else is okay deserves somebody asking whether he's okay too.

Maybe it's about understanding that I can help people without destroying myself.

That boundaries don't make me selfish.

That asking for help doesn't make me weak.

That blood isn't the only thing capable of creating family.

That being loved doesn't automatically mean I'm about to be used.

And that I don't always have to fight alone.

I'm still learning how to believe all of that.

But for the first time in a very long time, I'm actually letting myself try.

One day at a time.

One wall at a time.

One relationship at a time.

And to the very small number of people who kept showing up until I finally realized you weren't trying to take anything from me:

I see you now.

Thank you for loving me long enough for me to finally learn how to let you. ❤️