Recently, in a support group I’ve been moderating with my Dad, a mental health therapist, since the long blur of COVID, I offered a small piece of homework—something I rarely do. But sometimes you can feel the shift before anyone names it, the quiet sag of spirits, the way the room grows heavier even through a screen, sometimes entirely unspoken. And in those moments, my instinct is to place something steady in our hands.
So I asked them to look for the good. To notice what is meaningful. To gather the small, stubborn glimmers. This post is me doing the homework too because I also needed the reminder that good still glimmers amongst the hard as I face starting a new chemotherapy, Taxol (Paclitaxel), this week.
This week, the day after starting Taxol, I will travel to Philadelphia with my mom for the Living Beyond Breast Cancer Metastatic Breast Cancer conference—a gathering that feels, in so many ways, unlike anything else. This year marks twenty years of this space being held for us, twenty years of carving out room for a community that lives in the tension between time and its absence, twenty years of supporting the Stage IV Metastatic Breast Cancer (MBC) Community,
And this conference—this is one of my glimmers.
Lately, the weight of metastatic breast cancer has felt particularly sharp, particularly loud. And yet, threaded through it, there is this: a place where I am understood without translation. I’ve written before about the way this community fills a space nothing else can. How we find each other across distances and diagnoses, how we meet each other exactly where we are—without pretense, without the need to explain the ending that hovers just offstage. We walk alongside one another in ways that are both ordinary and sacred.
We also lose each other.
Again and again.
And we carry them with us—into conversations, into laughter, into the quiet moments between. There is an unspoken knowing that some of the hugs we give this weekend may be the last. That some goodbyes won’t announce themselves as such. That even in celebration, grief stands close enough to touch.
Most of these relationships are built in the in-between spaces—on screens, in messages, in late-night exchanges that hold more honesty than most face-to-face conversations ever could. Some of the people who have altered me most profoundly are people I have only held in person once, or twice, or not at all. And yet—the connection is no less real, sometimes more meaningful, more sacred.
The conference itself feels almost like a crossing-over point, where the digital becomes tangible. Where names become voices, and voices become arms wrapped tightly around you. Where we marvel at how tall or short people are in person–something very hard to gauge in a Zoom square.
The first time I attended, in 2019, I arrived as part of the Hear My Voice advocacy program. It was only the second time I had been in a room full of people living with the same disease—but this time, there was purpose braided into it. Direction. A sense that even here, especially here, there was still something to build, something to say. I needed that then. I still need it now.
This year, I will step into that space again—part participant, part witness, part worker. I’ll moderate a panel, spend time at a booth, support the work that continues to hold so many of us up. But mostly, I will gather moments. I will choose connection over sleep. I will meet people I’ve only known through words. I will hold close the ones I have loved from afar. I will hug people I may never see again.
I will go, even though I dread the grief that comes afterwards.
Because the anticipation of this good thing is not simple. It comes embedded in something much heavier. Someone I know wrote recently about holding hope and fear in the same hand. She was speaking about a clinical trial, but the truth of it stretches wider than that. This is how we live. We hold joy and dread in the same palm.
Love and grief, side by side. Presence and absence, at once. We do not get the luxury of separating them. And yet — it is worth it. Every complicated, beautiful, unbearable second.
No Half Measures 