to please the people around me. As my identity crumbled, I had to look for new answers to all the old questions—Who am I? What do I want from my life? —and then begin to rebuild anew.  

I decided to write this memoir after presenting at a Breast Cancer conference in October 2017.  My presentation was titled ‘We lose ourselves in books, we find ourselves there too’, and the response to my words was remarkable. All around, people were nodding and smiling and sometimes laughing. They were connecting with me. They were sharing in my experiences. Every person who listened to my talk that day had their own unique story that was most likely very different from my own, yet we had this common understanding that was very powerful. It was comforting to know we weren’t alone in our struggles. That someone else understood. 

As the title of my conference talk suggests, I lost myself in the experience of cancer and found myself there too. I learned how to live well in spite of my difficult circumstances and I learned how to have a lovely, sustaining relationship with the most important person in my life. Me.

This is not a how to book. It is not my wish to instruct anyone on what to do if they find themselves in a similar situation. Their experience will be different from mine and they’ll need to find their own way. I have, however, described some of the things that I found helpful and I’ve included a book list at the end that includes titles and authors of the books I mention.