‍Just before the diagnosis, we are on Kaua‘i for a short trip. I book a massage at the hotel, and as the therapist begins working on my arms, nearing my shoulders, then my left armpit, I surprise both of us as quietly I begin to cry. I’ve never cried in a massage. But I can’t seem to stop the tears from running down the side of my face. She tells me, gently, that this is a natural reaction. Perhaps the body has something it needs to release. A few days later, back at home, I had my biopsy. Shortly after, I learned I have breast cancer. The cancer just so happens to be on the same side of my body that triggered the tears.

All of a sudden, I realized I had stopped looking at my body. Not out of vanity, but out of distance. Somewhere along the way, it had become a thing I carried—not something I truly lived inside. It wasn’t intentional, nor an act of rebellion; it just… happened.

In the years after my diagnosis, my body became a vessel—something I moved through but no longer inhabited, carrying me from one shadowed place to another. I didn’t want to look at it. I was angry at it. It had betrayed me, hadn’t it? Grown something inside me that could take me away from my children. Altered itself without my permission. Changed the trajectory of my life in ways I could never undo.

So, I stopped listening.

‍It was a warm June afternoon. I was in my new therapist’s carefully curated, sunlit room. It was our first session. After I had given her an outline of my cancer story, and she asked me when it was, I had started to feel well.

I groped for an answer I knew wasn’t there. I stared at the window, as if the answers to this question were hidden somewhere in the white venetian blinds. They were not. The truth, I quietly realized, is that I had not been feeling well, had not been living well. When I went back to work full time two years ago, I gave everything I had—and more that I didn’t, to my work, grateful to be alive. Ignoring my body. I had recovered enough to function. But four months ago, I started having debilitating panic attacks at work.

The river was frozen, massive chunks of ice floating silently between the large boats that sat in the river separating my hotel from the touristy shops across the way; the ones selling homemade dish towels, chocolate balls covered in sprinkles, and pomegranate juice. Stockholm in the winter shared the gray skies of the East Coast cities I was used to, but there was an understated glamor threaded through the cold winds, every window above the sidewalk revealing a curated cozy interior, heads bent over books placed under glowing table lamps, candlelight flickering on the sills.

I was there for a medical conference, sent overseas by my job to present an academic poster.