Three things.

One – it’s my best’s birthday today. Happy Birthday my love. I love that we get to celebrate you today. Thank you for being such a rock for our family in the good time and in the difficult ones. Your steadfast, selfless love is a most precious gift that we are all better for. Thank you for choosing us every day.

Two – it’s the last day of 2020. I’ve appreciated this wacky, hard, unexpected year for so many things. The challenge. The slow down. The quiet. The constant adapting. The perspective growing. The saying yes. Or no. The overhauling of values. The tangible grace infused into each day. …Each of these vital to living a purposed life.

Third – I have a friend who has recently learned her breast cancer has now metastasized to her brain. She updated her CaringBridge site today, about a year after she updated her site that it had metastasized to her lung. Ugh. I don’t have many words today because I just don’t know how to hear this news. 

What I do know…Live short. Take today and be in it…fully. Show up, do your best, be humble. Tell people WHY they matter to you. Be grace-filled. Love intentionally. Choose gratitude. Live purposed.

*Post 1005

No post for 12/31/17

2019 :: 12/31/18 :: Post 475

Happy Birthday to my love. Happy New Year to us all. 

2 years ago today was the start to two of the hardest years of my life….one trauma after another….a lot of lessons learned….magnificent transformation….a deep richness to living life this side of heaven. 

So much more on my heart to write but just so tired. 

Living Changed Head to Toe Day 31 :: 12/31/19 :: Post 839

I have often used the word ‘transformed’ throughout these past two and almost-half years since I heard the words, ‘you have cancer’

….pause for just a second…I just wrote the words, ‘you have cancer’… and those words still stop me in my tracks. I’m curious if those words or if the memory of those words will ever not stop me in my tracks. I was just sucker-punched in the gut writing them, much like it felt the day I actually heard them…..

Anyways, ‘transformed’ is one of my go-to words when talking about cancer. Since the very beginning, the numbers tell quite the story: 28 months, 126 weeks, 877 days, 230 appointments, 186 DIFFERENT medical or medical admin people, 48 hours of receiving chemo drugs, 110 trips to Rose, 135 different times when I was naked in front of another person or group of people, 204 days wearing a full body suit; 4,890 hours wearing a full body suit, 13 surgeries/procedures where my body was cut into, 29 scars from neck to knees, 851 days of writing daily with appx 219121 words and 809 times I used the words ‘grateful,’ ‘gratitude,’ and ‘thankful’ in my posts. From the outside: I have fake boobs made of fat, skin and implants with tattoos all over them, my hair is curly and coarse and mousey, the exact opposite of what it was before cancer took it…my 29 cancer-related permanent scars…my eyes are tired and you can see the exhaustion of battle in them…my nails have permanent ridges in them from the destruction of cells that make them…and you can tell by the way I walk that I am in daily pain. From the inside: I’m ultra-connected to what my body senses and feels (which is combination of everything I mentioned above and the overcompensation of the fact that I missed or subconsciously ignored the fact that this cancer was likely present and growing in my body for months and maybe years before I found it). I think differently. I feel differently. I trust differently. I eat differently. I fear differently. 

My body and my soul are totally transformed. In many ways, it’s good. In many other ways, it’s really hard. Early on in ‘survivorship’ (the phase of cancer that comes after treatment), I said surviving cancer is harder than treating it… It was a crazy thing to think at the time and I felt a little bad saying it because I wasn’t sure how it was heard by others, but tonight, as I write what is possibly my last daily post (I have a feeling I’ll write every few days or weekly or maybe it’ll be random depending on the day, I’m not yet sure…), I stand by that statement boldly. It’s not to say that treating cancer is a picnic because that is pure ridiculousness, but surviving cancer, living out the forever-impact that it has had, the every-painful-step-I-take, the scars I have to see, the memories I have to hold, the trauma triggers I have to manage, the brain fog and fatigue and dry eyes and brittle nails and fragile self-image that I have to accept…all of that is surviving cancer. Treatment has an end. Surviving, though, well the end of that is heaven.

Living changed, head to toe, day 31… As hard as survivorship is, I endeavor to survive well. I will attempt to live changed in light of all that has changed me. And I can’t help but hope differently, too. For all of this transformation, I am deeply grateful.

(This was in fact the last day that I wrote daily until I picked up that habit again in September of 2020. It was interesting having stopped the daily habit…I realized how much I needed a little break. But, I’ve also since realized how very much daily writing is vital for my living on purpose.)