The Butterfly Path

Finding Safety After a Cancer Diagnosis

There’s a moment after hearing the word cancer when everything goes quiet. It’s not just fear—it’s something deeper. A sense that the ground beneath you is no longer solid. That your body, once a place of safety, has become unfamiliar terrain, a frigthening place to be, even.

I’ve lived that moment. I’ve experienced the panic, the confusion, the deep dread and the uncertainty. But I’ve also come out the other side—not fully cured – yet – but changed. Grounded. Safe in my own skin again. You don’t need to wait until you ring the bell, marking the end of conventional treatment, to feel safe again, It is possible to restore trust and faith in your body sooner than that and to start to feel that you’re on solid ground again. This is how I got there.

1. I Took Responsibility for My Health

That doesn’t mean I blamed myself. It doesn’t mean I tried to fix everything overnight or took on the impossible task of knowing everything there is to know about cancer. What it does mean is that I decided to show up. To be involved. I learned everything I could about my diagnosis. I researched conventional treatments, alternative approaches, and everything in between. I asked uncomfortable questions. I looked at potential root causes—not to find fault, but to understand how I got here.

That act alone—being curious instead of helpless—helped me reclaim a sense of agency. Understanding why I’m doing certain treatments and knowing what the alternatives are, makes me feel more empowered and more in control of what’s happening to me.

2. I Reframed My Perspective

Very early on, I stopped seeing cancer as the enemy and started seeing it as a message. Not a punishment, but a symptom—an alarm bell ringing from deep inside my body. It was telling me I was overwhelmed. That I was tired, disconnected, and not listening to what I really needed. When I really stopped to think about it, I realised that I’d been abandonning my own needs, for the sake of others, my whole life. I had been neglecting myself and that needed to stop.

That shift changed everything. When I stopped waging war on my body and started partnering with it, I found clarity and a deeper sense of self-worth. The war narrative around cancer ignites our fear response. Instead I chose to reject that narrative and work on calming my nervous system and restoring my inner peace.

3. I Found Hope in Other People’s Stories

There’s nothing more powerful than knowing you’re not alone. I found stories of people who had lived through what I was living through—and come out stronger, more alive, more connected to themselves. I read or listened to as many radical remission stories as I could, of people recovering from cancer, against all odds and even when science said they couldn’t. Their paths weren’t always easy or linear, but they were real. And they reminded me that healing is possible in so many forms.

Hope isn’t naive, it’s real and I needed a bucket load of it and so I made the conscious decision to let it in.

4. I Listened to the Diagnosis—Not the Prognosis

The prognosis is just a guess. It’s a number pulled from studies and statistics, and while it can be helpful, it’s not me. I’m not a number. I’m not a graph. I’m a living, breathing human being with a body that is always trying to do it’s best for me and given the right conditions, knows exactly how to heal.

No one knows my body better than I do. And while I respect my doctors and the science, I also believe that I have a say in what happens next. That belief—that I’m not powerless—became the foundation I stood on.

I won’t say I never feel fear anymore. But fear no longer drives the car. I do. When we stop waging war on your own body, start listening to what it needs and start honouring those needs, when we inspire ourselves with stories of hope and look beyond what others think is possible, we start to feel grounded. Fear fades and safety, hope and freedom start to return.

This isn’t just about surviving cancer. It’s about learning to love and trust my body again. And that, to me, is the most powerful healing of all.