Please don’t try to ‘go back to normal’ after the trauma of cancer treatment, because you will not find it. The normal you remember before the treatment has gone, and the sooner you make peace with that, the sooner you can truly move on.

This is the secret: while you were going through the pain and sorrow of cancer treatment, everything inside you was dissolving and evolving, letting go of old parts of yourself and creating new ones.

You could say cancer treatment took part of you away, but in doing so it allowed a purer part of who you are to come to the surface.

The cancer treatment is over, and a lot of what and who you were before the cancer has gone with it.

Through the negative experience of cancer treatment you have the opportunity to rediscover yourself, to peel back the layers and connect with the very purest part of you that’s probably been buried for most of your life.

My life before cancer was great, but if I compare that life to the one I have now, post-treatment, I wouldn’t go back there for all the money in the world. No, really: if you told me you could rewind my life so that I never had to go through cancer treatment, I would say thank you – but no thank you.

Cancer treatment didn’t take your beauty, your identity or anything else. Yes, going through that trauma changed you but, contrary to what you may believe right now, it didn’t change you for the worse – it changed you for the better.

Cancer treatment was the cocoon where I underwent an incredible transformation.

I hated the person I had become through my cancer experience – she was unfamiliar, and that felt strange and incredibly uncomfortable. And to feel that way is perfectly normal.