Stop trying to fix your body. It was never broken.
Decide whether you want to be liked or admired.
I began to see my body like an iPad or a car. I would drive it and demand things from it. It had no limits. It was invincible. It was to be conquered and mastered like the Earth herself.
It is almost a guarantee that in the pursuit of security you will become more insecure. Inherent in the quest for security is its undoing.
Once you are diagnosed with cancer, time changes. It both speeds up insanely and stops altogether.
Cherish your solitude. Take trains by yourself to places you have never been. Sleep out alone under the stars.
If you are divided from your body, then you are divided from the body of the world.
I feel very passionate that we need CAT scanners in every country in the world. There’s not a CAT scanner in all of eastern Congo. People don’t use the word “cancer” because they don’t get diagnosed. They just die.
I wake up every day and I think, ‘I’m breathing! It’s a good day.’
If you are connected to your own internal being, it is very hard to be screwing and destroying and hurting another human being, because you’ll be feeling what they’re feeling. If you’re separated, it’s not a hard thing to do at all.
Danger lurks when people are dissociated and detached from their own story or feelings.
People didn’t feel so much shame around it and that they didn’t feel so much humiliation around it. And the other thing that people have given me a lot of feedback about – something I’m very excited about – is all the stuff around chemo as an “empathetic warrior.”
Security isn’t what I hunger for. I hunger for change. I hunger for connection.
You have visits, then you have disappearances. You enter, then you exit. You come, you go. It would be so great if you could just get to human enlightenment on a linear path.
There were momentary visitations. I was a visitor, not an inhabitant. I think I say that at the beginning of the book: “I have made visits to the earth in my body, but it’s always been as a visitor.”
Anorexia was my attempt to have control over my body and manipulate my body and starve my body and shape my body. It was not a very good relationship. It was the sort of relationship my father had to my body. It was a tyrannical, “you’ll do what I tell you” relationship.
I’d stop calling it “chemotherapy.” I’d call it “transformational juice.” Infusion suites would become “transformational suites” or “journey rooms.”
I think what all of us have in common is that we’ve been taught and trained and programmed to focus on fixing and mutilating ourselves. That’s a core reason why women do not have power in the world.
I think what’s been true across the board is the universal patriarchy, the fear of women ever being born back into complete sexuality and life-force. This manifests itself in different cultural variances, but that’s really what’s going on everywhere.
I think being an activist and an artist is an interesting contradiction, because so often they are at odds with one another. When you write as an artist you have to clean the palate of your own politics in creating characters and activism is kind of the exact opposite.