Yesterday, I celebrated my 12-year anniversary of being cancer free!

If we’re new friends, you can get the scoop on my entire cancer journey in this blog post.

Around here, we call my anniversary my “second birthday.” I take the day off work and celebrate just like it’s my birthday—treat myself to lunch, self care of some sort, and cake, always cake.

I often get asked what my biggest lesson was from having cancer, and while there are many, sitting at the top of the list: It WILL get better. Whatever you’re going through right now, whatever you’re feeling, however long you’re going through it or feeling it, it WILL get better. It may not always be in the way you think it will, or how you want it to end, or in the timing you expect, but it WILL get better. I’ve seen it and lived it.

I look back on so many moments in my life and wish I could go back and tell myself that, and that I would believe it when I heard it. I have vivid memories of crying in my middle school bedroom after a fight with a friend, thinking it was the literal end of the world. Asking my mom if I could transfer schools or move to live with my aunt in New Mexico, but within 48 hours, it had blown over. And that’s small scale (although life shattering at the 13-year-old time). Infertility, marital disagreements, family drama, finances, work stress, and yes, even cancer. Somehow, they WILL get better.

I hope that as you read this today, you can find some hope and peace in these words.

What’s something you wish you could go back and tell your younger self? Who knows, someone might need to hear it today.

XOXO,

Molly B.