TRUST
Trust. It's an interesting thing. When we are young, we seem to be innately trusting, born with a sense of safety and a confidence in that safety. Then, as we move through life and begin to experience the wide world, that trust gets knocked and bruised and damaged. A little is taken here, some is put back there, and we balance it out this way until the inevitable day that something much bigger happens.
No one gets through this life unscathed, and if you are reading this, it's likely that cancer has left its mark on your life, either through your own diagnosis or someone close to you. Trusting after cancer can be a one of the most difficult struggles we face while trying to find our footing in our life's new landscape. Trusting ourselves in our life after cancer, trusting our bodies again, and trusting our futures, these are all areas where our trust has been damaged, and it takes time and effort to build that back up again.
Trusting ourselves can be difficult because cancer can cause our self-confidence to falter. While some are empowered by their cancer journey, many feel beaten down both physically and mentally and can have a hard time trusting that they will be able handle life after cancer. I am here to tell you that you absolutely CAN, it may just take some time to believe that. You have been changed by your experience, so take the time to reconnect to this new you. Get to know your new dreams, your new capabilities, your new perspectives and feelings. Learn to trust yourself in this new life by falling in love with this new you. You got through cancer, you can get through whatever is next.
And it's not just our inner selves that are changed by cancer; we are physically altered as well when we experience weight gain or loss, hair loss, the loss of body parts, and more. Many also feel as though their bodies betrayed them, and building that love and trust back again can be a challenge. The first thing to do is to forgive your amazing body and acknowledge the incredible healing work that it's doing; your body is doing the best that it can to heal and keep you rockin' through the next 40+ years of health and happiness, so generate feelings of gratitude for that. Get to know your new body, and build that connection with yourself again. Tell your body it's doing an absolutely amazing job of healing (I mean this quite literally, speak the words out loud or in your head!), and practise patience with your body and with yourself as you learn to navigate this new terrain with it.
Trusting the future is harder, and fear over the future of your health after cancer and the anxiety surrounding the possibility of recurrence can be debilitating some days. I turn to control when I'm feeling anxiety, so I know how much this can suck, but as difficult as it can be to accept,
we cannot control the future or know it. So, our only choice is to learn to let go of the need to control and the need to know. I'm still working on this every day, but for me, building a belief in something,
anything, bigger than myself was integral to this process. Call it the Universe, God, Universal Energy, Angels, Mother Earth, whatever feels right to you. Work on trusting that everything is happening for your highest good by building that belief in and connection to something more. For me, this has mostly been through meditation, journalling, and spending time in nature, but what whatever makes you feel connected is what you should make time for.
It's a STRUGGLE BUS for me with this a lot of days, and I experience much anxiety about the future and what might be going on inside of my body. But, it's something that I'm working on, and that's the most important thing. Keep working on trusting, even if it's little steps and you feel like you aren't getting anywhere, because trust me, you are.
Happy Healing
