It is healthy to feel your feelings.

The best advice I have ever received is to feel your feelings but don’t let them consume you. Allowing yourself to get consumed is how you’ll get lost, and you will not be able to tell the forest from the trees.

To allow anything to consume you is admitting that you’re going to let that thing eventually take over, and as previvors, survivors and thrivers, we can not afford that. Resistance to consumption is not simple and it will take practice, similar to meditation.

First and foremost, identifying what is troubling helps you process what you feel. Most recently, I have likened feeling my feelings of negative or disappointing news to short periods of grief.

Grief must be exercised by mourning.

When I contracted a staph infection in my radiated breast [in July], I mourned the loss of my original timeline for reconstruction.

I mourned the loss of money that it would inevitably cost me.

I mourned the loss of my expander and that skin.

I mourned the investment of time I’d spent researching and finally choosing that treatment plan.

But no matter what happens in my journey and life, I will always be a mother, wife, sister, daughter, friend, author, and woman. Your heart and actions make you those things, not body parts.

I am more than my breasts.