The news of a cancer diagnosis can demolish the reality in which you currently reside. My reality was spent at twenty-seven-years-old when I was diagnosed with Stage IV Colon Cancer. It was an upheaval to the life that I had so customarily taken advantage of. It was taking a health crisis to shake up the frozen patterns of my former ways. Of course we think we know the person we’d become if we had to survive something, but I had no idea the transformation I would undergo to becoming the person I am today; a five-year survivor and fighter, with 100 chemotherapy rounds under my belt.
What I didn’t know when I was initially diagnosed was that I was in the midst of a soul crisis. I identified with illusory things, materialistic items, and inauthentic attachments. Ego manifested on the surface, seeping it’s way into every corner of my life. Undergoing chemotherapy stripped me of my physical identity, losing my hair, breaking out in rashes, and finding myself barely recognizable. The illusion I had about my looks has made me realize that when all of that is taken away, you are left with what remains on the inside.
For me, I took it as an opportunity to look within and resurrect my life for the positive, despite my situation. I began looking at things differently, finding new signs and significances to symbolize my experiences. Coming to an understanding that I was being used as a tool, for which I might never fully understand why, and still somehow discovered peace within that.
Cancer and chemotherapy opened the terminal to overcome fear. Fear that there might not be a tomorrow, and that you have to make the most out of every moment you are given. Being faced with my biggest uncertainties day after day has not victimized me, yet showed me how strong I am. By not allowing the strength to harden me it has instead made me graceful and opened my heart to life’s storms with a new perspective that perhaps that is what life is all about; how you weather the storms.
Although I can’t say that I would willingly sign up to be a part of the cancer club, I can say that it has unlocked a truer version of myself, with authentic self-image, both internally and externally. By not resisting this complete change and crisis brought into my life, I see now that it was the universe helping me to see past negativity, ego and inherit my potential of human and spiritual growth through the hurricane of illness.
I feel as though I have gone through a form of superficial death, but with that has come a rebirth where I am connected mind, body and spirit. It took the crisis of cancer in my life to bring a reconstructed clarity and balance to my inner self. There was resolve for change, a wave, a crashing and cancer was that storm. Accepting my new truth, instead of seeing it as an obstruction has brought self-realization, new energy, and a refreshed outlook on life. Positivity necessitates effort, but if you change even the slightest shadow cast upon your life, the message of the crisis will reveal itself, teaching you the most valuable of lessons.
