The Cancellation Tax
The bill nobody warns you about when you get sick.
I’ve heard of the gluten free tax - I pay it daily as someone with celiac disease.
I’ve heard about a general “chronic illness tax.”
But what about the thing that haunts me the most? CANCELING THINGS! All. the. freaking. TIME!
Remember my wheelchair article from last week?
The flight I was set to take - and get my wheelchair for - was supposed to be yesterday (Thursday).
Another flight exactly two weeks after my whirlwind 48 hour nonstop trip to Vegas? Why did I say yes to this? Am I crazy?
Honestly, yes. I ALWAYS do this. And I hate it. It’s a big area of chronic illness grief and acceptance that I’m working through.
So how does this happen?! I said yes to the trip and booked it on a good day. A day when I felt like myself, when my body was cooperative and my brain was making plans like the old me used to.
That’s the trap. You make the plan on the day you feel capable, and then the day you actually have to show up arrives with a completely different body attached to it.
Air travel and my POTS do not get along. (POTS is the thing that makes my heart act like I’ve run a 5K when all I’ve done is stand up to get water lol I despise it so much.)
And up until a few years ago, I loved flying. I love travel. I love LIVING! In the world! Experiencing things. I could just get up and go. That Katie no longer exists. Every trip take planning and research due to celiac and POTS and other issues.
Now fast forward again to this week’s canceled trip. It was a few days prior when I started to realize how drained I still was.
I’d traveled a few weeks before this, so my body had already filed its formal complaint and was pretty much over it.
One morning I woke up at 5am, exhausted but couldn’t sleep, and I did the realistic, honest, deeply unfun thing. I canceled.
It’s like ripping a band aid off. Disappointing people makes me want to throw up.
And this is where the tax comes in and where the bill comes due.
There’s the part you can see on a receipt:
The flight. The hotel. The concert ticket I was so excited about. Always nonrefundable, because I never learn my lesson.
That’s real money, gone, in exchange for nothing except staying home in a body that needed me to stay home typing a Substack post and working on Inner Peace Art Studio goodies.
Nobody really talks about the money grief of being sick. The slow, expensive drip of plans you paid for and couldn’t keep. We’re not even going to get into the medical bills in this post.
Then there’s the part no receipt shows you.
The cancellations that don’t cost dollars:
Canceling on myself. Canceling on people I love, again, catching that flicker of disappointment even when they’re kind about it. Canceling the version of me who used to just go.
Because that’s the one I’m still grieving. I used to be go, go, go. Yes to everything, on a plane every other week, never the one who bailed. I’m not her anymore, and some days I’m still trying to be, which is its own special kind of exhausting. Grief isn’t only for the big losses. Sometimes it’s for the small, steady stream of things your body quietly takes off the table.
For a long time, canceling felt like proof that something was wrong with me. Not wrong with my health. Wrong with me. Flaky. Unreliable. Too much. And I didn’t invent that feeling out of nowhere. Plenty of people handed it to me, in tones and sighs and “again?”s, until I started carrying it on my own without any help.
I’m D O N E carrying it.
What I’ve finally stopped doing: treating an honest cancellation like a character flaw.
I’m not flaky. I’m a person making a real-time decision about the body I have today, instead of forcing it to honor a promise the body I had two weeks ago made on my behalf. When I cancel because my body isn’t okay, I’m not failing anyone. I’m being honest.
This is also, weirdly, why I’m changing how I run my business.
I built a lot of my work the way I built my old life because I was building during the diagnoses and early grieving stages. Go, go, go. Big plans, hard deadlines, a calendar that assumed every future version of me would feel as good as the one who scheduled it.
Well my friends, it turns out you can pay a cancellation tax in your business too. When you white-knuckle a plan your body can’t keep, something always gives, and it’s usually you.
So I’m going my own way with it now. Less forcing. More honoring the ebb and the flow. Building the kind of work that has room for a flare day, a rest week, a season where I slow all the way down and nothing falls apart while I do. For me AND my members. Not because I’ve stopped caring. Because I finally understand the math.
One more thing, and it might be the most important part.
There’s no shame in coming back, either. You can cancel, disappear for a bit, go quiet, miss the thing, and then return without a single apology for having left. You don’t owe anyone an explanation for resting.
You get to walk back in like you belong there, because you do.
If you’ve paid the cancellation tax too, I see you. The literal receipts and the invisible ones. The sickening feeling when you send the text or make the call. The regret of the lost money. The FOMO when you see photos of the event.
You’re not alone. You’re not behind. You’re not broken. You’re navigating a body that changes its mind, and that is not a moral failing.
And to the rare few who actually get it, the ones who hear “I have to cancel” and say “of course, rest, I’ve got you” (my cousin, thankfully <3) without making you over-explain it. Thank you. You have no idea!