If you haven’t already, now is the time to give yourself authorization to define your own journey. Put yourself in a can-do space. In my mind, you are a survivor the day you are diagnosed. As women and men with cancer we live every day with a suffocating weight on our throats. What if? Will I see my next birthday? Can I get married? If so, can I have children? Perhaps you’ve already fashioned your nest, yet in less grounded moments you find yourself paralyzed with angst, imagining yourself gone and your kids being raised by a stripper. CanSer (or any adversity) puts us on the rim and while we are on the rim we have an opportunity to appreciate and express fear simultaneously. We multitask dying with living while managing our chores in order to keep it together and stay out of prison. So why not celebrate all that we’ve managed to accomplish already? Sometimes just keeping it together is surviving.

Don’t be timid or feel like you are jinxing yourself. Stand up straight and yodel the S word! Survivors come in many shapes and sizes. The best part about being a survivor is the appreciation we feel for the little things (even when they’re painful): the sheer joy of peeing in the ocean; of crying so hard that you burst into giggle madness; the agony of suffering over a lost love or a perished dream. Survivors squeeze every drop of delicious juice from this extraordinary life.

From diagnosis to discovery, survivor is an attitude. You, my friend, are a survivor no matter what. I am a survivor. We don’t wait ’til the icy patch thaws before celebrating life. We see freedom, create it, become it. When I put cancer behind me and started smiling again, the disease lost its grip on me. Isn’t that what the “cure” is all about?

Write it here . . . I am a SURVIVOR, a Crazy Sexy Survivor and thriver! Now twirl!