Are We A Fit?

Most "about" pages are about the person who made them. This one is mostly about you, because whether we're a fit depends as much on you as it does on me. Read through and see if you recognize yourself.

You were someone before cancer decided to take over your life.

You're probably a traveler. Or a mountain biker. Maybe a hiker who reads the trail map before anyone else is awake. A weight lifter, a motorcycle rider, a Zumba instructor, a skier, a gardener, a yogi, a baker, a writer, a potter, a poet, a painter. A mom who gets down on the ground to play, or a grandmother who chases her grandkids at the park. A volunteer who shows up for everybody else first. A woman with a full-time job and a full life.

You were healthy. Busy. Active. You were fun. You didn't see cancer coming, because nothing in your life suggested it.

And cancer hasn’t become your identity. You probably don't post about it much. You're not in the support groups, online or in-person. Most of the people you see in a week couldn't tell you what your exact diagnosis was or what type of surgery you had. You focus on your real life and keep the hard parts to yourself, because there is never a good place to put them down. This is the “you” you are trying to be, but cancer keeps demanding your attention. You are what I call the “silent majority in breast cancer land.”

And this is what makes it extra hard for you.

You're capable. You've always been the one who runs the show: the one people call when something breaks, the one who figures it out, the one who takes care of things and everyone else. You've handled harder projects than this one. But now your body is the project and it came with no instruction manual.

You were sent home with appointments on a calendar and the expectation that you'd figure out the rest. So now you're trying to run the show of your own recovery without the knowledge or the skills for it, and for the first time in your life, competence doesn't help. You feel adrift in your own body.

It's a body you don't recognize, and maybe don't want to look at. Joints that ache and slow you down. Fatigue that keeps you from showing up like you’re used to. And nobody told you the rules — or worse, everyone told you different ones. One handout says fifteen pounds, one practitioner says no blood pressure on that side, one Facebook group tells you everything that could go wrong. So you're left doing your own risk math on every grocery bag and grandkid, deciding what you're 'allowed' to do with no one to check your work.

But here’s what the fear and confusion actually does.

Now you hesitate at the top of a trail you've skied a hundred times. You approach lifting your grandchild or walking your dog like a calculated risk. You fall off your bike in your head a dozen times before your feet touch the pedals thinking about the damage you could do to your reconstruction, your surgery sites, the swelling you're terrified of inviting back. You've typed 'is it lymphedema or' into a search bar and closed the tab before the results loaded, because finding out felt worse than not knowing.

It was never really about the pain. Fear like this steals your trust in your body, and your trust in your body was holding up your confidence in everything else — who you are in your own mind, not just what you see in the mirror. You may know perfectly well that you're more than a body. You'd just never had to test it before. Cancer tested it.

And maybe one of these is you too:

You're outrunning it. Type A, capable, keeping pace with your old life or even a faster one — partly because staying busy means you don't have to feel what happened. Except your stamina isn't what it was, and some part of you knows you can't outrun it forever.
You're avoiding it. Facing it feels like too much, and you have no idea where you'd start. So you pretend like you’re past it.
Your grief and anger are always just below the surface. You can’t talk about it without tears welling up as you try to hold them back because you’re afraid if you start you won’t be able to stop.
You're reconsidering your whole life. You wouldn't be the first woman I've sat with who left a marriage after cancer - sometimes by her own choice, sometimes because a partner drifted off somewhere during treatment and never came back.
Your relationship with your body was already hard. You judged it and worked on it and tried to fix it long before any of this. Cancer made the distance wider.

And somehow, through all of it, you still come last on your own list. By nature or by circumstance, everyone else gets taken care of first.

And none of this depends on where you are in your experience. Newly diagnosed and still in treatment. Just finished and wondering what now. Nine years out like me, or living with metastatic disease and navigating a different map entirely. The experience changes shape — the woman inside it doesn't.

And here’s what you really want.

You want to live a long time. Sure. But that's not the real want.

The real want is to enjoy your days. To be at the wedding, present and having fun, not managing pain through it. To take the trip — the one you booked in the chemo chair as a promise to yourself. To ride the bike. To eat and drink what you love. To look in the mirror and see yourself instead of a reminder of cancer. To be intimate — with a partner, or just with your own life again. To work. To travel. To live, laugh, love, and all that jazz.

It all comes down to one word: freedom.

The freedom to do what you love without fear. That's what you're after. That's what I'm all about and what I’m here to help you find.

Plus a few words, because they matter.

If "survivor" fits you, use it freely: it's your experience to name. If it doesn't, you're in the right place anyway. I rarely use it myself: it carries a win-or-lose framing I never signed up for, and I have no use for battle language around cancer. You won't find pink sisterhoods, "breasties," or breast friends here either — nothing that makes this experience cuter than it is. Around here you're a woman who had breast cancer, lives with a breast cancer experience, or whatever name you've decided fits — it's yours to pick, and while we respect all self-assigned labels, we don't stick them on others.

We likely share some views on important things...

You don't have to be loud about your experience to belong here.
You believe healthcare is a right, not a privilege - and that human rights matter more than profits.
You’re with me that reproductive rights are about so much more than abortion and that they are central to evolving women’s healthcare.
Trans rights are human rights. You're an LGBTQIA+ ally, and you know that sexual orientation, gender identity, and self-expression do not harm anyone except the person being bullied or oppressed for just trying to be who they are.
You're anti-racist, pro-immigrant, and you believe black and brown women deserved better from the medical system centuries ago, and sadly still do.
You'd rather your tax dollars plant trees and feed kids in your community than start wars we can’t end.
You try to live by values like these: love, freedom, curiosity, joy, sustainability. Not perfectly — but they're the measure you keep coming back to.
You believe and trust women.
And fuck the patriarchy. Obviously.
The pink is complicated for you. You’re not trying to hide your experience but you don’t want to wear it on your back like some sort of branding or social club, either.
You've also intentionally stopped buying from the brands that slap a ribbon on everything in October (and maybe even called out a few who have but aren’t showing receipts for how they “help”).
You know awareness isn't the finish line, especially for metastatic breast cancer, where research funding still doesn't match the stakes.
You know that a cancer experience is about so much more than treating the disease and that the system didn’t set you up for success in survivorship (I go deep on this on my philosophy page).

If some of this makes you want to click away, this isn't your page, and I mean that without hard feelings. If some of it made you exhale, I thought so. Keep reading.

On investing in yourself...

You already know the free version of cancer support. Support groups. Pink rubber bracelets. A hodgepodge of tote bags and makeup samples and whatever the nonprofits scrounge up. Some of it is lovely. None of it goes deep or gets to the heart of what you live with every day.

That’s why you don't believe everything in cancer land should be free — because you know what free gets you, and you know what your healing is worth. Starting with free resources is fine. But going deeper means investing your time, your energy, and yes, your money in the things that matter to you — and your healing is at the top of that list, even if until now, you've spent years putting yourself last on it.

On politics...

You vote. Not because it’s a perfect system, but because you understand what it is: a right, a privilege, and a responsibility. You'd rather see someone vote than not vote, even when you'd never vote the same way. And you'd rather see people lose their guns than see one more child die in another school shooting.

On spirituality...

You have an open heart about it, whatever it looks like for you. Faith, religion, practice, or none of the above — you let people believe what's true for them without judgment or expectation. For the record: I no longer consider myself Christian, but I believe in a universal connectedness among all beings and the magic that creates. I’ve seen too much to be an atheist or nihilist and it’s perfectly ok if you are.

On adventure...

At home or across the world, you love experiencing what a place has to offer — the culture, the music, the history, the food. You're the one who plans the trip, finds the trail, and makes sure you all make it back safely at the end of the day. You're the one who finds the tiny restaurant two streets off the main square, who books the tour nine months out, who has a list going for the next place. Maybe you booked a trip during treatment just to have something to live toward (I know I did!). And sometimes your favorite adventure is the one that involves a few friends and a quiet night in. And I love that about you.

On health and food...

You know that food is about nourishment, not punishment or reward. Enjoyment doesn't have to mean overindulgence, but it definitely doesn't mean using food as a form of control, or letting fear deny you another cookie or night out because some headline said it causes what you've already survived.

And it was never just food. It's the same reflex in the bathroom and under the sink — the deodorant thrown out after a scare post, the "clean" moisturizer that cost more than dinner and didn’t take away your wrinkles, the cabinet full of products you bought out of fear instead of what actually works for you. Somewhere along the way "healthy" got confused with "anxious," and you're done letting a headline decide what goes in you or on you.

Health, to you, means balance with what actually works for your life: homemade deodorant or Dove off the drugstore shelf. Organic when you can, frozen when you need to. The workout and the nap. The green smoothie and the wedding cake. What works, what you enjoy, what you'll actually keep doing — that's the whole standard.

You often find yourself talking about...

Nature. Creativity. Whimsy. Feminism. Love. Personal growth. Learning new things. The book you're reading, the trail you found, the hobby you’ve started, the business you're building, the grandkid who said the funniest thing. Whatever it is, it lights you up, and you light up other people with it, even when you're quietly running on empty yourself.

Your dreams…

Not bucket-list dreams, though those too. The real ones:

To live in confidence and peace as much as possible. To go about your days without constant fear or grief riding shotgun. To look in the mirror and see someone familiar and beautiful. To share yourself openly with the people you love. To stop criticizing your own body after everything it's done for you.

A little about me, since you've read this far.

I'm a cis-(mostly)het 50 year old white woman, diagnosed at 41, currently with no evidence of disease. I’ve been working in this field since 2012 and first encountered breast cancer at the age of six. I do my best to be inclusive of every lived experience, and I'll be honest with you: some of them I can't know, because I haven't lived them. What I can do is keep learning, keep listening, and be a useful resource anyway. If your experience is different from mine, you still belong here — I just promise to never pretend I know exactly how it feels in yours.

(And because fit is about whole people, not just work: I travel the world with my husband, friends, and family. Gen-X Swiftie. Buffy superfan. Kenny Rogers devotee. Happiest in tattoos and overalls. Obsessed with opossums and shopping secondhand. Former semi-professional a capella singer, former artisan bath salts maker. I joke that I have to thank cancer and Lexapro for curing my fear of flying — I've since gone paragliding in the Swiss & Italian Alps.

The full story of how this previvor became a practitioner became a survivor lives on my bio page.

We probably are NOT a fit if...

You want quick tips without the context like a 30-second demo or a top 5 list of triggers to avoid. Those exist everywhere. Real healing takes more, and that's the only kind of work I do.
You want someone to fix you. Our goal is self-sufficiency, self-reliance, and self-confidence. The whole point is you moving from dependent patient to the director of your care team.
You aren’t willing to get curious and try new things. No one person or program can solve all of your problems, so you need to be open to trial and error and customize your toolbox along the way.
You’re looking for a breast cancer influencer. I'll celebrate with you, and I’ll commiserate with you, but I don’t dance or sing about cancer.
You find swearing unprofessional or inappropriate. I know when to walk the line but you deserve all the fucks I have to give.