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 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 in 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 cancer.