The Sunday email that came on a Tuesday, and why I decided to send it anyway.
From the Sunday Self-Care Chronicles | 7/19/26
Hey friend,
I'm feeling a lot of shame about the fact that this email, called The SUNDAY Self-Care Chronicles, is going out on a Tuesday.
Because I pride myself on having kept a (mostly) weekly newsletter sent on Sundays for the last three years, and missing this past Sunday feels like a failure on my part.
But that's exactly why I'm sending it anyway, and I hope the lesson within lands for you as heavily as it did for me.
For years I've talked about the difference between what I call passive recovery and active healing. My basic viewpoint is that one is what happens to you, and the other is what you make happen.
Still, despite believing this, it took me years to figure out how to explain the difference in a way that was both conceptual and actionable. After a LOT of focus on it last year, it's become what I now call The Six Fundamentals of Active Healing after a breast cancer diagnosis.
And today I want to talk about the first one, Time and Space, and why starting here might be the catalyst for everything that comes after.
Time might truly be the only non-renewable resource that every single one of us wishes we had more of.
When we're diagnosed, all we can think is I need more time.
You sat in a chemo chair, or lay strapped to a radiation table, or carefully moved your drains around in the shower, all the while thinking, I just need more time…
Time to:
see your child grow up, graduate, get married, or maybe even have their own child
celebrate another anniversary with the partner you adore
spend more time with parents or grandparents who make you feel safe and loved
finally publish the book you've been writing only in your head for years
travel to your bucket list destination to swim with sea turtles, dolphins, or sharks
climb a mountain or hike a pilgrimage in another country
or simply see another sunrise and marvel at its beauty
For some, the gift of more time is granted, and you get to do, see, and be everything you were hoping for in those dark moments.
For many, the time comes but the things that kept your hope alive get lost among the responsibilities and obligations of returning to day-to-day life.
Recovery happens — drains and stitches come out, burns fade, hair grows back — and you return to the office, or the carpool, or being the on-call child for your aging parent (or the one who simply keeps your own household afloat).
Life takes over, and once again there just doesn't seem to be enough time to take care of yourself, let alone write a book, hike through a new country, or plan that snorkeling trip with the animals you still long to see outside of an aquarium.
Because the thing no one told you about time is that it's not enough.
Yes, time is a critical factor when it comes to healing wounds, physical, mental, and emotional. But for most people, relying on time alone will only get you part of the way there.
What you really need is time and space.
Time happens whether you're paying attention to it or not. It passes regardless of how you're using it. And the truth is, in a modern society, there will almost never be enough of it, because we've built a world of busyness and pushing past, where expectations of how we should spend our time outweigh what we actually do with it.
If that seems a little bleak, I apologize, but I think knowing it is the first step to making the most of the time you have. Because time only works in your favor if you create the space for it to do so.
I watch this play out on my table every week. Given enough time, most women will eventually reach the day they can lie face down without pain in their chest, and that milestone tends to arrive on its own. But raising their arms overhead again, sooner and with less pain, almost never comes from waiting. That comes from the work we do together, and the work they do at home between visits.
One is time doing what time does. The other comes from space they had to carve out.
Personally, I learned this the hard way. Up until two years ago, I spent much of my life running at an unrealistic pace, filling my days with things that mattered to me but that also kept me from the very goals I thought I was working toward.
I'd been trying to pare down for years, dutifully saying "no." to some things so I could say "YES!" to others, and somehow the space always filled right back up.
Then two years ago, I hit my wall and shut it all down.
I resigned from a nonprofit board with no notice, walking away as president in the middle of my term. The old me would have been appalled at breaking that commitment. The me I was becoming knew there was no other choice.
I did the math on my "enough" number of clients and realized I could drop from four in-person days to three without going bankrupt, which handed me a whole extra day to build the foundation of my business.
Then I ruthlessly cut anything that didn't move the needle on my well-being or my goals, and intentionally scheduled everything that did.
It wasn't easy or comfortable. I felt enormous guilt, and a lifetime of pressure to keep showing up for everyone the way I always had. I had made "busy" a badge of honor, convinced that constantly giving my time to others was the most generous thing I could do.
But I finally realized that by always showing up for everyone else with my time, I never left myself any space to show up for me.
Now, I know not everyone can make the changes I did. I'm self-employed, so I ultimately control my schedule. I have a supportive partner and no kids, so outside of family and friends, our time is largely ours to spend.
I don't share this to say "just do what I did." I share it because it took me until my sabbatical this spring to really understand the difference between time and space, and I don't want it to take you as long.
In the three months I was away from my practice, I made more progress toward my long-term goals than in any other three-month stretch of my life, and I did it without working around the clock.
Because in Italy, my focus was singular: get up, eat breakfast, do a little sightseeing, do a little work, relax, have dinner, go to bed. Some days held more work, some held none, but whether I worked two hours or six, what I worked on had my full attention.
Most of us bounce like pinballs from one thing to the next. Everything is a priority — home, family, work — and with all the benefits of technology come the challenges of being endlessly connected and available.
In Italy, the six-hour time difference meant I had until about 2:00pm local time before the East Coast woke up and my inbox began to fill. Whether I was in an Airbnb filming videos or sitting poolside writing sales pages, there was nowhere else I felt I needed to be.
If I'd stayed home for those same three months on my usual schedule, I guarantee I would not have launched my program and welcomed its first members this month, because I simply wouldn't have gotten it all done. Same time, different space.
And here's the part I most want you to hear: you don't need three months in a foreign country. I don't think you need anything close to that.
What you need is to recognize that time and space aren't the same thing, and that both are necessary if you want to change how you make progress on a goal. Any goal. Including healing from breast cancer.
Time and Space is just one of the Six Fundamentals of Active Healing, and over the coming weeks I'll share the rest, because I believe you have to tend to all six to truly take an active approach to your healing.
But if you've been feeling stuck in your recovery, or somehow behind where everyone else thinks you should be,start by looking honestly at how much time and space you're actually making for yourself to heal.
It doesn't need to be three months of undivided attention. But do you even have one hour a week that is exclusively about YOU?
And not just an unscheduled hour, but an hour where your attention rests on the grief and anger you still carry, the scars that still pull, the fear and confusion that well up with every unexpected twinge.
That's the difference between relying on time and making the space.
Because you cannot learn what's happening in your body, or advocate for better care, or build a self-care practice, or feel at home in your own skin, if there's no room in your life to begin.
Recovery gets squeezed into the cracks of a week that never slowed down to make room for it. Appointments get wedged between meetings, sending you rushing from one thing to the next. The body check-in you keep meaning to do gets pushed off again and again. The rest you keep postponing until things calm down never comes, because things never quite calm down, so you crash, exhausted but never truly rested.
For most of the women I work with, the primary missing piece is exactly this. There's simply nowhere in the week for healing to live.
This email didn't go out on Sunday because last week, in the hours I wasn't with clients, my priority was getting the Mind-Body section of my new program up and running and making sure the people already enrolled felt supported.
Then I spent the weekend with family and friends at a concert, deciding my own rest and relaxation needed to come before this email.
And even today, I chose to skip a Zoom I'd signed up for, because I can watch the replay, and finally getting this to you mattered more.
So this first Fundamental isn't only a necessity. It's also a kind of permission. Permission to put something down. To skip a meeting. To take the weekend off. To let the email be a day (or two) late.
I'd love to know: when did you last give yourself unhurried time in your own body, with nothing scheduled right after it? And how did it feel when you did?
Hit reply and tell me. I read every one.
See you on Sunday.
P.S. My next free Ask Me Anything call is Thursday, August 20th at 12:30pm ET: come meet me, ask anything, no strings. I'm giving you a full month's notice this time so it can actually make it onto your calendar. Save your seat here.
P.P.S. And a reminder that the free Starter Kit is always there to share with someone who needs it.