Hey, long time, no see!

I remember when I was first diagnosed, I found this really great blog written by a young woman who’d also navigated a breast cancer diagnosis and treatment. I devoured her posts, grateful to read the words of someone who’d already walked the path I was about to take.

But then, her posts stopped. Not because of something bad, but rather, because she was doing well. She was living life and moving on.

That’s kind of where I am right now. I’m two years and eight months removed from my diagnosis. I’m almost two-and-a-half years removed from chemo, and it has been more than a year-and-a-half since my last surgery. Not a huge amount of time, but enough to feel some distance.

My hair is getting long–it hangs just past my shoulders when I straighten it. And it’s getting less curly and easier to manage. In fact, when I got it colored recently, my stylist remarked, “It feels like your hair again. It didn’t feel like your old hair when it first came in, but it does now.” She’s right. It’s softer and less coarse. When I look at myself in the mirror now, I don’t see such a stranger looking back. That has done wonders for my self-confidence. Truth be told, while I was grateful to have hair again, I hated it so much when it was short and super-curly. I felt ugly and unlike myself–it was yet another indignity to suffer after what seemed like an endless stream of indignities during treatment and surgery.

My anxiety is a lot better, too. That first year–whew, that was rough. I feel like I was living in a near-constant state of panic. I certainly still have my bad days, but nothing like that. And when I was in the throes of that anxiety, I never would have believed I’d get to this place–that’s what anxiety does, it whispers in your ear that things will never be fine. It lies.

Am I still afraid? Sure. Do I still worry about recurrence/metastasis? Absolutely. But I’m not preoccupied with it. I’m doing my best to keep moving, keep living.

And that’s why this blog has sort of fallen off. It was a place for me to vent about the painful, surreal process of cancer diagnosis, treatment and survivorship. I still plan to talk about that stuff from time to time, but I feel a shift in myself that I think should be reflected in this space, as well. My blog’s tag line is “life after cancer,” and that’s what I’m going to focus on from here on out. Not forgetting the past, but certainly not dwelling on it, re-chewing it long after the flavor’s gone.

So, hopefully you’ll hear from me a little more often. And hopefully what you hear will be less about cancer and more about simply living a good life.