Elephants and Tea - June 2021 - 32

Dear Cancer,
FIGHTERS
Dear Cancer,
The obvious and expected thing for me to say
here, is that I hate you. Without a doubt, the
complete chaos, self-doubt, fear, pain and grief
that you have brought into my life has shaken
the very foundation of my existence that I had
meticulously built. Your presence in my life has
uprooted almost every aspect of what I knew
to be constant like nothing ever has before. It's
been three and a half years since I heard the
words " You have cancer " and I'm still desperately
trying to escape from your grip that you
have so tightly clenched around me.
It's so tight that sometimes I can't move, hell,
I can barely even breathe. You quite often rob
me of my sleep at night and you have stolen
from me the mere idea of a promise that was
tomorrow. As honest and real as all of this is,
what I want to tell you, however, is that with
all of the challenges you keep throwing at me,
I am and always will be stronger than you.
My resilience doesn't come from having
cancer, it comes because I choose every single
day when I get up in the morning to be resilient.
My strength doesn't just exist because of
all that I've endured because of you, it's there
because I choose to never give up and I will
never let you call all of the shots. My newfound
zest for life isn't because of you, it's because I
make the choice each and every single day to
live my life with insurmountable gratitude
and ambition. It's not you that has made me
an empathetic person. When I look at others,
I make the choice to really see them and allow
my energy to connect with them. As hard as it
is not to focus on everything that I once was,
instead I choose to see what it is that I can and
hope to become.
You see, I am finally giving myself the permission to be me in the most authentic way possible.
Sure, you might have forced my hand at discovering these things about myself all at once
rather than bit by bit as I age, but I'm sick and tired of you taking the credit for how my life has
changed. How I've changed. You constantly tear me apart and I am the one constantly putting
the pieces back together. You figuratively and quite literally left me broken, but I am choosing,
as hard as it sometimes is, to see myself as whole. The joke is on you because true strength lies
not in tearing down, but in building back up.
My scars tell the story of a woman who is refusing to hand her life over to someone unworthy
of her. The gifts that I'm seeing and experiencing because of your wrath, are because
I am doing the work day in and day out to discover light in the darkest of places. You are not
my story. My choices, my strength, my resilience, my determination.... I am my own story.
Stop taking credit for making me who I am today. F*ck You.
Yours TrulyMIA
TARDIVE (A woman defined by her willingness to rise...not by cancer.)
32
ELEPHANTSANDTEA.COM
JUNE 2021
unworthy
My scars tell the story
of a woman who is
refusing to hand her
life over to someone
of her.

http://www.ELEPHANTSANDTEA.COM

Elephants and Tea - June 2021

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