“Hey cancer, you picked the wrong bitch.”

“Been there. Beat that.”

“Remission rocks.”

“Survivor.”

“;”

This is a selection of bumper stickers and tattoos devised by cancer survivors. Of these, I choose, if choose I must, the semi-colon. It is discreet, obscure, open to interpretation. To me, it signifies cancer as a pause, a clause, not necessarily the end stop; liminal, it conjures a bridge between one life and another, one self and another.

Today is National Cancer Survivors Day or NCSD, an American initiative launched in 1988. It is marked with local events in various countries around the world, including the UK. In the US, NCSD groups organise parades, parties and pampering. They stock up on NCSD merchandise: visors, badges, balloons, banners, T shirts – “the one must-have item” in their catalogue.

Self-proclaimed cancer survivors are an out-there bunch; to count myself among them, I should really ditch the semi-colon in favour of something defiant. I’m thinking CKMA, as in “Cancer, kick my arse.” Since I’ve just had a bowel cancer scare ruled out, it could be my little joke. But beneath the joke would be the fear: I was treated for head and neck cancer in 2014 and I don’t fancy another. But, like so many so-called cancer survivors in so-called remission, I wait for one. I wait, alert, in no-man’s land, the place to which my mind returns in between all its other preoccupations and activities. It is an eerie place, the fear of recurrence. A grenade may whistle into the expectant silence any time – or never at all.

“Cancer survivor” is not a badge I reach for. Does that mean I want to hide who or what I am, or rather, who I have become? Perhaps. The very word “survivor” irks. It speaks of fighting, of scars and leaving others behind. “I battled cancer,” reads another bumper sticker. “What’s your superpower?” “Survivor” smacks of victimhood, too, and of exposure to dreadful atrocities. Some people are hit with depression, insomnia, anxiety and PTSD; “survivor” implies that your cancer is history, which is one reason Macmillan prefers the phrase “living with and beyond cancer”. It’s not catchy, but it factors in the impact cancer has beyond the duration of the disease itself.

I can only describe that impact as a feeling of living in a perpetual after. It is uncharted territory, unfamiliar, forever changing, full of surprises. Here the survivor analogy holds: to live well here requires survival skills, adaptability and resilience chief among them.

In the immediate aftermath of my curative treatment in 2014, long before my very recent and rather begrudging acceptance of my place in no man’s land, a new, post-cancer landscape started to form around me. I didn’t know what was going on. I kept looking for the yellow brick road that would lead me back to the old, pre-cancer me. Various emotional aftershocks threw me off track, came after me, in fact, like the San Andreas Fault. The first, shortly after the initial elation after getting the all-clear, was impatience, followed by gratitude, guilt, compassion, fear and, finally, a sense of failure. There were no half measures; each was felt with a head-splitting intensity that eventually sent me running to my Macmillan psychologist. In short, I thought I was going bonkers, and that no one else had the slightest inkling. “That is exactly how my brother felt when his cancer treatment was finished,” a friend said of her sibling, who’d had cancer in his 20s. “The after for him was the hardest part.”

I was wildly impatient for everything to be normal again. I laugh at that now, think: fat chance. Friends already thought I was. It’s so great that you are back to normal, they’d say. But I couldn’t eat and was frightened of recurrence. I know, isn’t it fantastic! I would reply, which made me feel alone with my non-normal, wanting-to-be-back-to-normal self. When I told Dr Suleman, a UCLH Macmillan clinical psychologist, he said: yours is a common response. In other words, quite normal.

“Have some answers ready that will work for you when people ask you how you are,” he suggested, “such as: I am doing well, thank you, I am on the road to recovery. Or, the recovery is going well.”

The insertion of the word “recovery” was all that was needed to let others know that I was a work-in-progress.

Some time after this, I was able to start trying to eat again, and was very grateful. The trouble was, I suddenly felt grateful for everything. I’d walk down my street, stop, and say thank you to the paving stones. In the park, I’d see the grass, the leaves on the trees, the twigs and the gnarly nodules on the twigs, and I’d thank them for being there. It made me see Wordsworth and Coleridge in a new light; I never realised what a lot of energy it took, being moved by nature all the time.

When I told Dr Suleman I couldn’t think for all the things I had to thank every second of every minute, he said:

“Are you religious?”

“No,” I said, somewhat disingenuously. “Why?”

“Because you sound a bit hard on yourself.”

“I just want people to know I am grateful.”

“How could you measure your gratitude?”

“What do you mean?”

“How could you go about showing people how grateful you are? What would be the proof?”

I thought for a long time, and then said: “I don’t know.”

“That’s because there isn’t a measure for gratitude. You could go on and on, pushing yourself to be more and more grateful. But you could never be grateful enough because you’ve got no way of measuring it. So give yourself a break.”

I wasn’t quite off the hook, though, because I couldn’t stop being grateful to be alive, which triggered survivor’s guilt. I remember walking on Hampstead Heath and thinking of Primo Levi. I know how you feel, I wanted to say. But the Italian Jewish chemist was a Holocaust survivor, and all I had endured was stage 1b cancer. To have had Levi and myself in the same thought felt obscene. Meanwhile, every time I went back to hospital, or saw someone who looked diminished, I felt sharp pangs of compassion. The fear that my luck wouldn’t last had by now intensified; sure enough, nine months after the all-clear, a lump appeared where it shouldn’t. It turned out to be benign, which in turn intensified the pressure on me to be even more grateful.

The final emotion to send me reeling was a sense of failure. I felt I had fallen short of what is expected of a cancer survivor. I told Dr Suleman I was supposed to be a better person.

“Who says?”

“Everyone. Everyone says that when you have cancer, it’s a transformative experience. You see everything differently, and you become good.”

“Did you like your old self?”

Blimey, what a question. “It was all right, I suppose.” He didn’t know the half of it.

“Then go back to your old self. Go back to where you were before. I give you permission.”

“Really? No transformation?”

“No transformation.”

The pressure to have what UCLH Macmillan Support specialist Vikky Riley calls a “cancer epiphany” was off, and that was a big help at the time. Today, however, living as I do with both my cheer and my fear, I still haven’t found the old self to which Dr Suleman said I could return. Instead, I hover between two selves, as if waiting for a better fit to emerge. I am that semi-colon. I think of the bardo, that between-consciousness state so vividly explored in George Saunders’ novel Lincoln in the Bardo. His dead cemetery dwellers are trapped in a Dantesque limbo. They don’t want to leave where they are, and, for very different reasons, neither do I.

But I am definitely up for time out from the round-the-clock mental processing and deal-making with the Ferryman. Walking down my street today, I sometimes ask myself why it is that I want so badly to live; I interrogate why the will to do so is so strong. Of course it is. In which case, I shouldn’t berate myself for wishing I could stop listening out for the grenade that might come my way any time soon – or never at all.

Milkshakes and Morphine by Genevieve Fox is published by Square Peg, £14.99, and is also available on audible.co.uk. Buy it for £12.74 at theguardianbookshop.com