Member-only story
Finding My Bearings Now
2 min readJul 21, 2023
A rambling, unfiltered diary about living with breast cancer
Some facts:
- Today I am living with breast cancer.
- I have every reason to believe that one day I will be living after breast cancer. This diary will end when that part of my life begins.
- I don’t consider myself on a journey, and I am not making any effort here to shape my experiences into well-crafted essays or any kind of story here.
- I am a writer and an accidental diarist, and have reason to hope that if I make my personal thoughts about these experiences public it might prepare, comfort, commiserate and/or encourage (?) others.
- Primarily, this diary is a way for me to process my experience in real time.
(Which, according to Wordsworth, just might be the opposite of poetry.) - The diary begins here: May 5th, 2023. Instructions for Assembly
Just as I’d retired my very public journal as the “archive of self-absorption” and decided to stop “sharing my work”, I discovered a painful lump in my left breast. (Lump, by the way, is a very inelegant word, and far too vague for something as defined as cancer.) It was only 9 months since my last clear mammogram.
It’s not that I think the world needs another cancer diary. Or another gratitude journal…
