Favorite Posts

A woman in a hospital gown sitting on a hospital bed, holding a camera and taking a selfie in a hospital room with medical equipment around.
Hospital room with closed cabinets, a computer monitor, and a medical waste bin, illuminated by a ceiling light and casting a shadow on the wall.

These are the ones I return to.


If you're new here, these are my favorite essays—the words I’ve penned that speak most clearly to the strange and sacred tension of holding both life and loss at once. The poetry and prose that helped me begin to make sense of how to live with cancer; not just in spite of it. My “Favorite Posts” section is my personal back-catalog, your bootleg Amy Lee record.

I’ve stopped thinking of this as a fight in the traditional sense. Not because it isn’t hard—God, it’s hard—but because I realized I didn’t want to spend what time and strength that I have swinging at a shadow. I wanted to be curious. To ask “Why now”, not “Why me?”

These pieces explore what it means to stay open when everything inside you wants to close. To stay soft in a world that demands steel; to love the thing that’s threatening you, if only to learn what it came to teach.

So browse. Peruse. Pull up a chair and stay a while. Laugh with me, cry with me, and—most importantly—learn with me the fucked-up beauty that’s to be found in a cancer diagnosis.

Hospital room with a hospital bed, walker, and a diagnostic chart of the digestive system on the wall.
A hospital gown hanging on a stand decorated with a floral arrangement of yellow and orange flowers.
Scenic landscape of a river winding through grassy and forested land with mountains in the distance under a hazy sky.
A young woman with long blonde hair holding a Canon camera in front of a dense green leafy wall, wearing a striped t-shirt and a plaid shirt tied around her waist.
A black and white photo of a person with short wavy hair and earrings, shown from the shoulders up, with an older person's hand touching her neck and collarbone.
Person in beige suit holding a large white gift box with a black ribbon.
A brown, coiled, poop-shaped object on a plain white surface with a shadow to the left.
Silhouette of a person holding an eyeliner pencil, with shadows cast on a textured wall by window blinds.
A man in a white lab coat using a microscope in a laboratory with shelves of books and stacks of papers.