I would erase it in a heartbeat – and I wouldn’t undo who I’ve become.
This is the paradox I live inside of. The thing I most wish had never happened shaped me in ways I never asked for, ways I wouldn’t have chosen, ways that sometimes feel like betrayal. And yet, those same ways have given me boundaries, clarity, tenderness, and depth. I don’t want cancer. I don’t want Li-Fraumeni Syndrome. I don’t want the surgeries, the scans, the drains, the uncertainty. And yet, parts of me I love – the ways I connect, the ways I feel, the ways I see the world – exist only because of it.
I do sometimes miss the old version of me. I mourn the innocence I lost. Some days I wish I could go back. And then I remember: the woman I am now, the woman who loves fiercely, who feels deeply, who asks hard questions, who says no without apology, who speaks the truth without worrying how it will land, would not exist without the very thing I wish I could undo.
I’ve learned that loving this thing doesn’t mean pretending it was good or necessary. It doesn’t mean minimizing the pain, the fear, the loss. I won’t call it a gift. I won’t say it happened for a reason. I won’t dress it up as a lesson I was meant to learn. Loving it doesn’t require rewriting the truth. It only asks that I stop fighting my own life. Loving it means holding the whole story: the wound and the growth, the grief and the strength, the rage and the tenderness. I also know what happens when I don’t love it. I’ve tried. I become smaller. Tighter. I start living at a distance from my own life. I protect myself so thoroughly that nothing gets in – not pain, not joy, not connection. Refusing to love what happened doesn’t punish the past. It only punishes me.
Loving the thing I most wish had not happened is not a decision I made once and kept; it’s a choice that keeps returning. Some days I meet it with grace. Some days with resistance. Some days I don’t meet it at all. And still, the choice returns – asking whether I want to stay open or close myself off, whether I want to inhabit my life or hover just outside of it. It means noticing how I’ve grown in ways I never could have predicted; how I now notice small acts of courage in myself and others; how I can love deeply while also protecting my own heart; how I can sit with paradox instead of demanding tidy answers; how I can be alive to life’s full weight and still find moments of joy, wonder, and connection.
Along the way, I’ve also met some of the most extraordinary people. People I never would have crossed paths with otherwise. People who know how to sit with uncertainty, who speak in truth instead of platitudes, who understand loss without needing it explained. These relationships didn’t arrive as silver linings. They arrived as recognition. As proof that even inside one of the hardest chapters, connection still find its way.
One of the fastest ways I’ve learned to be present, truly present, is by becoming almost delusional about forgiving myself. Forgiving myself for what I didn’t know yet. For how I’ve coped. For the decisions I made in survival mode. For the moments I wish I’d handled differently. I don’t linger in self-interrogation the way I once did. I don’t rehearse alternate timelines for very long. Radical self-forgiveness loosens my grip on the past just enough to let me stay here. And staying here is the only way joy ever finds me.
Loving the thing I most wish had not happened doesn’t erase the wish. It doesn’t make the pain disappear. But it does allow me to step into my own life fully, without apology, with a courage I didn’t have before, and with a tenderness I never knew I could hold – for myself and for others.
I hold the wound and the growth together, and in refusing to choose between them, I choose myself.