Reflecting on Life Now That I May Lose It

Sharing some lessons for living a life you won’t regret

One morning back when I was a teenager a woman pulled me aside after church and asked if I remembered when she taught me Sunday school. “Of course,” I responded. She proceeded to tell me how I would come bounding over to her before class, then twirl around with great enthusiasm while asking, “Do you like my dress? Do you like my dress?” I was mortified by this story, yet, it also sounded accurate.

From my childhood through my early 30s, I used attention as a substitute for self love. As long as other people wanted me around and paid attention to me I felt validated and went about my days with a mystifying disregard for myself. After I began going to therapy and asked for homework (because who wouldn’t want to be an A+ patient?) I was assigned a book entitled Compassion and Self Hate. It was incredibly painful to read, and upon being given that assignment I realized that I had a lot of work ahead of me to improve my self esteem, much less learn to love my self.

I’ve provided this long-winded preface for a tough statement: last month I was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. It’s strange, because I’m quite a chatty person, but I don’t know how to talk about this — about having cancer and the medical stuff I’m going through…