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There is a particular kind of freedom in discovering that an old way of surviving no longer has to shape the life ahead.

There are moments when life begins to feel vivid again, and we remember that we are here to participate in it.

Some experiences take time to find their place within the life we are still living.

The last twelve months have been the toughest physical year of my life.

There has been surgery. Radiotherapy. Medication. Recovery. Fatigue. Rest. Fear. Faith. And the patient work of learning how to live inside a body that has frightened me, protected me, healed me and changed.

My first yearly check-up has brought its own reminder of the uncertainty that can accompany survivorship. I’ve been called back twice for further imaging, and I’m currently waiting for my next appointment.

This, too, is part of survivorship.

The appointments may become less frequent. The scars may soften. The world may begin to assume that because active treatment has ended, the story has too. Yet there are still scans. Ongoing medication and symptoms. Call-backs. Waiting. The psychological work of learning to live between reassurance and uncertainty.

There is something fitting about preparing to publish my next essay, Diamonds and Dust, while I am still living inside one of the questions at its centre: how do we participate fully in a life that has never promised us certainty?



📸 Photo by Marc Sirisi

I’ve been writing this essay, in one form or another, for almost a year. It has been pieced together from private journal entries, voice notes recorded throughout my experience, fragments written during treatment, and reflections gathered as I began to understand what cancer had altered in me.

Breast cancer is the doorway. Beyond it are questions about health grief, the body, mortality, identity, survival, legacy, and what it means to return to life after life has interrupted the story you thought you were living.

Faith has been an anchor throughout this year. This is the first of what I hope will be many years in which I continue caring for this body, strengthening it, listening to it, and making it abundantly clear that cancer is not welcome here.

For all the private battles I have endured, I hope something of the strength I have gathered, inner and outer, reaches whoever needs it as they read these words.

Diamonds and Dust: On Health, Grief, Mortality, and the Art of Participating in Life will be published in September.

If you wou

Sometimes, we meet ourselves again in the places we thought we had lost.

Healing often begins with learning the difference between what pulls us away from ourselves and what brings us back into alignment.