Creating space for me

I found solace in writing after my cancer diagnosis, it may not be for everyone but just writing down words, any words, it didn’t matter, they were my words.

It’s liberating to take it out of your headspace and onto a piece of paper. I always hand wrote my mind reflections (to be honest I look back at them now and have no idea what rubbish I was writing).

I got serious about creating space for me and I wrote down things that made me happy during the day and started to create a daily ritual list. I didn’t want rituals that would take a long time (who does!) just short ones that could set my day up to be the best it could be regardless of how I was feeling.

There is something quite glorious about getting up in the morning and telling yourself that it is going to be an awesome day. I might not have always had an awesome day, but at least I was thinking that it had the potential to be.

I made other small changes too; I started to think more about what I was eating. Not crazy mind you (I still eat crisps and drink wine) I eat a lot more single source food now, one ingredient, picked off a tree or pulled out of the ground.

I have always been a vegetarian, so that was no big change but I started looking at ingredients in foods and stayed away from anything that had a list as long as my arm. Do I feel better for it, yes, but I was hardly a “grab a cheeseburger in the middle of the night kinda gal”.

That is why I was somewhat perplexed about getting breast cancer in the first place, I didn’t tick any of the boxes, I wasn’t overweight, not diabetic, I had had children, blah blah, I am not even sure why they even publish “breast cancer risks”, the only box I could tick was being a woman, and there is nothing I can do about that one (LOL).

I cannot control everything that happens to me, but that I can control how I feel about it.

This takes practice and time (believe me) the old adage of “you are in control of how other people make you feel” is something I preach to my children, I had to start living these words; otherwise I was really going to lose it, big time.