Acknowledging Inner Strength
[Music]
have you ever asked yourself
how did i manage to get through that
it’s june 2019 and my wife and i
are sitting in the waiting room of a
medical center here in shenzhen
waiting for the results of my breast
biopsy
we were discussing going home the
following week to
canada and the united states to visit
our families as international teachers
do
during their holidays but that trip
would have to wait
you see one day my wife randomly found a
lump on my breast
and four to five weeks prior to being in
that waiting room
i had spent many hours
getting multiple tests done until we got
to the point
where we currently were i remember being
very anxious
very scared and telling myself
oh it’s probably nothing it’s probably
nothing honestly though
this was not denial because i was told
there was a 94
chance that i did not have cancer i was
told that was very uncommon in women my
age
i was 33 very active in the artist and
educational
community here in shenzhen i
felt and looked completely healthy it
didn’t make sense to myself
or anybody that i could possibly have
cancer
and then the doctor called us into his
office
we sit he pauses
i’m very sorry to inform you but you
have
triple negative invasive ductile
carcinoma
which is an uncommon form of breast
cancer
immediately i was in shock
i remember sobbing honestly the rest is
a blur
but i remember that my wife was
consoling me and writing down
everything we had to do moving forward
how did i manage to get through that
immediately when i asked myself this
question a flood of
overwhelming flashbacks come back to me
ones that were extremely tough
the new normal of being seen as a sick
person
not recognizing my mental and physical
self
feeling extreme pain after chemo
treatments
having this extreme hunger but at the
same time
it was hard to eat
apologizing for being sick
i’m canadian we apologize i guess we do
that
but the most traumatizing for me
was during this period my mother
was also diagnosed with cancer and
passed away and i was unable to be with
her
but after the tough memories subside the
wind of triumph come through
the ones that not only make me
acknowledge my family
and my community was here to support me
but also helped me to acknowledge my
sense of inner strength
and i feel like this is a product not
only
of circumstances and experiences i went
through before i had cancer
but also through the experiences of the
experience of having cancer
and this is not obvious to me it took a
really challenging time in my life
to realize this and it got me to
realize aha moments
that i was going through to connect this
to my inner strength
in 2018 or just
less than a year before i was diagnosed
i created this series called shadows
and here is shadows one to nine and it
was in reference to another challenging
time
in my life and
what it’s about is the idea that when
something happens to us it’s very
challenging
we hit the floor and get back up we come
back up
either stronger more fragile maybe even
a bit weaker
but we keep moving forward
what i find interesting about this piece
is that i created it pre-cancer
and started showing it and continued to
show it show it during my cancer
treatment
not only was it referencing what
happened to me in the past
but it was exactly referencing what i
was going through
when i was diagnosed i did not lose
sight of this
and this made me realize the inner
strength that i had to pierce
to persevere and to be very determined
i’ve always had this sense of intrinsic
motivation
to do what i love to do and through this
i took a lot of risks and i grew
when about 10 years ago
i took a job and came to china took a
risk
to teach art here and then about five
years ago
i became a founding member of an artist
community here in shenzhen
and through this community i was able to
network with other educators
other artists i was able to show my work
curate shows and eventually i was able
to put this experience into my classroom
and i spoke at conferences about it
during my treatment i took a giant leap
i decided to do more than just survive i
decided to
and within reason live my life as
full as i could under the circumstances
i was given
between chemo treatments i continued to
work as an educator i did not take your
traditional
sick leave i continued to show
my work and i continued to curate show
and i can tell you it took a lot of
willpower to do this and i would
constantly tell myself that i was strong
i was strong
i was strong
another thing that i did was during my
treatment i posted
about my journey and this was very
difficult for me
because it was something very personal
but
when i decided to have treatment in
china i wanted my friends and family
back home to know that i was going to be
okay
and i didn’t want them to feel sorry for
me
but in the broader sense i wanted others
to know that yeah you can be young and
you can have cancer
cancer does not discriminate
and i also wanted to share my story
through a positive lens
without losing
the hardships that i went through
through my posts i
was able to
do i post i was able to inspire many
people and i think that’s what i’m most
proud of
i inspired others to get medical checks
and go get mammograms i think all of my
friends got mammograms
like the next day honestly
i inspired other people who were going
through challenging times in their life
they saw what i was doing and they’re
like wow if she can go through cancer
and do that i can get through anything
i even mentored another foreigner here
in china
who had breast cancer and we became very
close friends
and most inspirational to me was i
inspired my mom
and it was crazy how that went down but
five weeks after i was diagnosed my
mother was diagnosed with stage four
non-hodgkin’s lymphoma and they found it
too late
and i knew it and my mom knew it but we
were positive about
it and through my posts my mom gained a
lot of strength to get through her
battle
and if you knew my mom like it’s the
other way around my mom gives me lots of
strength
this is my mom during her first chemo
treatment my mother passed away about 10
days later
due to complications she was just not
strong enough
ultimately this led me to acknowledge
the inner strength that i had
to be self-compassionate and to also
self-advocate and these are hard things
that we learn to do
or some of us just don’t learn it takes
forever
but i was always a compassionate person
but
having that sense for myself was just
something that i didn’t honestly really
think about
when you set high goals for yourself you
need to
understand your limits and through when
i was sick
i did still take a lot of risks but it
was filtered down into something more
manageable because i just couldn’t do it
and i think when i look back i think
that there was a lot of missed
opportunities that i had
but that was just the way it had to be
and i had to be okay with that
and i was in terms of self-advocacy
i learned to say no to a lot of things
i’ve always been a let’s do this kind of
attitude which is great
but you can only do that so much i
learned to be as clear and concise
as possible about how i was feeling so
people could understand
how they could help me when i was going
through this time i sought out
i sought out professional mental health
because it’s really impossible to go
through something like this without
having someone to talk to
and today these skills that i learned
through this experience
have really
have a big place in my heart because
they have made me stronger
when someone asks you how did you manage
to get through that
i challenge you to think about moments
in your life that were challenging
and i want you to think about the inner
strength you had to get through them
thank you