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" The ingredients of my life were an ideal recipe for stress. Start with a divorce, a remarriage, and a move that uprooted my two children from their father and moved us hundreds of miles away. Mix in a startup business that created fragile finances. Add living in a new community where I had no friends or support system. Top off with my sudden diagnosis with stage III breast cancer. End result: explosion into the perfect storm. When I look back on that time, what immediately pops into my mind is the &amp;quot;F&amp;quot; word. Not the one you&amp;#039;re thinking. I mean another 4-letter F word: FEAR. For anyone with cancer, fear is part of the deal. For me, it was overwhelming and over the top. Fear attached itself to me like Velcro. Or maybe more like a vicious virus: unstoppable, spreading everywhere, body, mind and soul, poisoning my relationships, my work, my well being. I lost my own mother to cancer when she was 41, and I already hovered on the edge of helicopter parenting. My worries had been garden variety \u2014 mostly that something bad could happen to my kids. Now suddenly it was me who was threatened. Cancer opened a Pandora&amp;#039;s box and nightmares tumbled out: Losing my breast. Pretty soon, both of them. Chemo. Losing my hair. Losing my energy. Losing my sense of security. All those losses paled by comparison to my main fear: losing my life and leaving my children motherless as my own mother had done. At first I felt almost too numb to fight back. I could barely function. Fear was an intruder breaking into my home, my bed, my head. Even sweet little moments with my children were transformed into little tortures. My fear was out of control and I felt I had to face it down. But how? Even a control freak can&amp;#039;t control cancer. All you can control is yourself. I didn&amp;#039;t choose to get cancer, but I could choose how I would react to it. The same goes for anything else we face in life. You might not have control. But you have a choice. And that choice is all yours. For me this meant struggling to climb out of the deepest pit of my life, my fear that I was doomed to die, to repeat my mother&amp;#039;s destiny, to leave my kids without me as their mother. Oddly enough, my ability to face the fear came from the same place. I was a mother. Maternal love fed my fear but also fueled me, and made me into a force. I was a model for my children, for what they would learn, and who they would become. Even if I died, I wanted my children to remember a mother who faced cancer fiercely, not fearfully. If only I could have waved a wand and magically made myself a superhero. But like most women who face breast cancer, and most people, I was part wuss, part warrior. Facing fear was a gradual process of small bites and baby steps. I stopped beating myself up for how I felt; I accepted fear as normal, as part of me. And I tapped into another part of me that I discovered could beat back the fear: resilience. I started a daily gratitude journal. Even with all my troubles, I could learn to notice and appreciate what I had. I had today. Same as I always did. Same as everyone else who didn&amp;#039;t have cancer. I just had to remind myself of that more often. I had to remember how lucky I was just to be here, and to be me. The more I could live in gratitude, the more I could let go of the fear. I was an advocate for my own health; and I expanded on that to help others. The more I could take my mind off myself, the more my brain turned away from fear. Though I was totally un-artistic and un-crafty, I discovered that the process of using my hands and creating art worked like meditation, and was therapeutic healing. Humor is healthy, and proven to be healing. So I looked for things that would make me laugh. Even, and especially, in the worst moments. Much to my surprise, sometimes the blackest times brought out the biggest laughs. Maybe that&amp;#039;s not really a surprise \u2014 what bigger victory could there be than being able to laugh in the face of what I most feared. And when nothing else worked, I just faked being fearless, even when I felt like a fraud. Until the balance finally started to tip. The fact that I survived cancer is due to luck. How I faced cancer is due to me. And nothing have ever done, other than my two children, makes me more proud. I use that experience all the time. I faced my biggest fear, and I can do it again. And again. This turned out to be a useful lesson, since somehow challenges keep coming. Now, when bad things happen, what immediately leaps into my mind is the &amp;quot;F&amp;quot; word. No, not fear, I mean the other one. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.goodhousekeeping.com/health/wellness/a34980/breast-cancer-facing-fear/>