One day I was reading my friend's website, and my jaw hit the floor when I read a post about grief. It was the first time I'd ever seen a "grief chart." I had no idea there even was such a thing, and I could easily identify myself at every single step of this big curve as a cancer survivor. I had been writing and sharing in my cancer journey for a few years at this point, and it had never occurred to me even once that this entire process and all that I was going through, was all really one massive grief curve.

An essay looking back on six years of young adult cancer survivorship. If cancer were to take me now, if today were my last day, and if this were my last sunrise, how would I feel right now? 

Experiencing fear on a regular basis comes with the territory of being a cancer survivor. It's a very normal and even healthy part of cancer survivorship, but something that needs to be managed, so here are six tips on how to help cope with and overcome it.

If there's one thing I've learned over the years as a cancer survivor, and just one thing I could say or one piece of advice I could give to cancer survivors everywhere who might be struggling in these challenging new lives as I had been, it's that the best way to survive cancer is to live the best possible life that you can.

At the start of 2014, after suffering from a year of such terrible anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress, I finally had my life figured out again after cancer. I was in the midst of this moment of clarity where I had an intimate understanding of all that had gone wrong in my cancer survivorship and why, and all that had gone right as well. I couldn't afford to let this moment of clarity go to waste, because never again in my life did I want to suffer as I had throughout so much of 2013, hurting as I had been, yet not knowing what to do. After four months of writing, I finally released this essay into the world, and was happy to see it spread far and wide. If you only ever read one thing from me, let this be it.