Once I finally ripped it open and saw the first words, “We’re sorry...,” I knew I was right. I was devastated. Furious too. Furious enough to call the admissions office and ask, essentially, how they could have made such an obvious mistake.

I was sure they wanted me.

They didn’t.

I remember feeling certain that this meant I would never get out of my hometown, which was dramatic considering I had applied to two other schools and had not heard back yet. Still, that is how rejection works when identity gets involved. It does not stay contained. It spreads.

Maybe Maryland’s no is what pushed me to walk on to Sacred Heart’s Division I field hockey team. Maryland was elite. Once they passed, I gave up any fantasy of belonging anywhere near that program except in the stands. So I turned the rejection into a private training mission. If they were not going to tell me I was a field hockey player, I would prove it myself.

Turns out, I was.

That has been one of the central tensions of my life: what to do when the parts of me I most want confirmed are not fully in my control.

Lately, I have been trying to loosen my grip on that whole pattern. To stop approaching everything through the ache of exceeding expectations and instead show up without immediately ranking myself.

This is almost impossible for me to do with writing.

I identify too deeply as a writer and storyteller. Word choice matters to me. Tempo matters. Scene, point of view, rhythm, revision. I do not spill things out and call them done. Even these pieces are worked and reworked before I post them. That does not mean they are flawless. It means I care.

So when I tried to think of a creative practice I could enter without needing to be good at it, I got stuck. Then I remembered all the paint left over from when Briggs was little and I wanted him to experiment.

I am not a painter. I have never taken a class. I have not studied technique. I did not even have canvases, only a few hundred blank, cardboard-like cards that looked usable enough.

I also hate washing brushes. So I decided to use whatever I wanted: paper towels, my hands, aluminum foil, parchment paper, plastic bags, burned-down incense, plastic bottles.

Now I spend a few minutes most days painting small pictures. Some days, like yesterday, I make more than one.

It still feels unnatural not to judge what I have made. But in giving myself permission to do something that does not have to rank, or earn, or justify itself, I can feel something in me loosening.

I have beaten myself up for as long as I can remember. Now I put the paintings on the wall as soon as they are dry.

I am an artist. It has taken me 45 years to say that without negotiation.

I am proud of myself.

One of the daily pieces. Todd thought it was “dark,” I think it’s cheerful. What do you think?

On sunny mornings, the light came through like a spotlight, crossing my toes and spilling onto the floor exactly where one small hop would place me inside it.

I had a very clear belief then: the sun was shining on me on purpose.

Not because it was mine, but because we belonged to each other in some private way. The spotlight and I were partners. Maybe soulmates.

That confidence usually lasted until I left my room. Then it would slowly erode over the course of a day spent among other people. On sunny mornings, I felt restored. On overcast ones, it was harder to believe I had ever been chosen in the first place.

Looking back, it is easy enough to see that attention has always fueled me. So has the feeling of being chosen for something. Stage, radio, television, writing, storytelling, leadership. None of that surprises me now. What surprises me is how early I began trying to prove that my ache for those things was not vanity, but destiny.

I tried in all the usual ways. Excellent grades. Constant participation. Kindness, even toward people who were cruel. Beauty, or my best approximation of whatever beauty meant at the time. Admiration at school, at work, in crisis, in love. I wanted proof that the light had not misled me.

What I built instead was a blinding scoreboard.

How many people liked me, really liked me?
Were my grades merit or personality?
Why was I chosen?
How much money?
How pretty?
How thin?
How much had I really accomplished?

No matter how I totaled it, I always came up short.

Over time, that internal tallying became its own kind of violence. Presenting. Performing. Evaluating. Condemning. Judging.

When the light failed me, I went looking for other proofs.

So last week, when I walked into my psychiatry appointment after the last 18 months and said, “I’m mediocre,” it did not feel dramatic. It felt like the meanest truth I could muster.

My psychiatrist is brilliant, so she did not try to argue with me in ways I could easily bat away. But I did get her to swear for the first time, and somehow that helped.

Afterward, I drove to Billerica to pick up Briggs. The plan was just to see him for a bit, but he had the next day off from school, so he came back to Bridgewater with me for the weekend.

On the long drive home, the sun finally came out. Just for a little while before it went down.

It found me again, with my son riding along, and for the first time, I think, I finally gave myself a W for something I had always ranked as the bare minimum: showing up.

Clearly, this is not Massachusetts in the early spring, but it’s the prettiest picture of the sun I have. And she deserves to be showcased.

“Will I ever care about my breasts hanging out again?”

I was exhausted and sad. Briggs was so tiny that most of his calories came through a tube threaded through his nose. The milk in the tube was breast milk fortified with formula, every calorie optimized.

I mostly pumped, not because I did not want to nurse, but because at first he was too little to do what full-term babies are meant to do: suck, breathe, swallow. It is a complex brain function that develops in the last stretch of pregnancy. We did not get that far.

For months, the feeding tube did most of the work. Then, slowly, we moved to breast and bottle.

In the meantime, I was topless every three hours, around the clock. It was easiest to pump in the hospital, where I could smell him, see him in the incubator, and trick my body into cooperating.

It also seemed that no matter how carefully I timed it, someone was always walking in just as I was taking off my shirt or putting it back on. A doctor. A nurse. An orderly. A visitor from the other baby’s family.

I remember saying something like, “At this point, the entire Patriots team could walk through, and I would not even flinch.”

The nurse laughed and told me my modesty would come back.

I told her that before Briggs, I had worn a two-piece bathing suit exactly once in my life. I could not wait to be done with this part.

She was right. My modesty came back. And once it did, it stayed. Since then, I have always noticed whether I was covered.

What has been harder to recover is any instinct for how to be kind to myself when my suffering is not in service of Briggs.

Motherhood asks a lot of me. It keeps rearranging my life, my body, my priorities, my sense of who matters most. But with him, even the hardest versions of myself have always felt usable. Necessary, even. For my son, I can almost always find some reserve of strength, resolve, comfort, or guidance.

For myself, I am far less merciful.

I am angry at the fatigue that lives with me now. Angry that I cannot simply override it. Angry that I can still get up, still move, still do things, and so often do not want to. That’s the part I judge most harshly. Before all this, I wanted to do nearly everything, or at least try. Now, more than anything, I want to rest. Sleep.

Sleep feels like surrender. It feels lazy, wasteful, almost ungrateful, even though I know that what is truly wasteful is the amount of time I spend judging myself for needing it. The judgment changes nothing. It helps no one. I still return to it.

That, more than the fatigue itself, is what wears me down.

I do not want to go away. I do not want my life to be over. But I do want some more familiar version of myself to return, and the longer I live with this diagnosis, the less convinced I am that she is coming back intact.

I would rather try to become who I was. Instead, I am left to learn how to live with who I am.

I think about who I once was, how little patience she had for wasted talent, unfinished things, a life not fully used. I can hear her asking me the cruelest possible version of the question: So what did you actually do?

She is not right just because I can hear her clearly.

But she is still loud enough to hurt.

Briggs was just the sweetest little thing ever…even at 2lbs.

There was a stretch of years when I raised money for a nonprofit focused on trauma-informed care for educators, social workers, and health care workers. A handful of donor names kept surfacing, and one stood out more than the others.

Let’s call her Ruby.

Ruby had been a steady and generous supporter of the organization for years, and from what I could tell on paper, no one had ever really reached out to know her. I would reconcile that.

I invited her to lunch in Boston. She said yes. I was surprised she was willing to drive into the city on a weekday, and a little awestruck when she arrived.

Ruby radiated. Gorgeous colors. Crystals. A feather earring in one ear, maybe peacock, and tiny studs in the other. She insisted I use her first name, as did I, and within a few minutes, we were on our way to Blue Dragon in the South End.

The conversation went long and wide. I learned Ruby was a medicine woman. I learned she had once heard one of the founders on the for-profit side of the organization speak and, in her words, felt her heart just open up. From that moment on, she devoted a percentage of her income to the nonprofit side of the work.

At first, that worried me. There had been a pattern in this organization: people hearing a founder speak, opening both their hearts and wallets, and still walking away without a concrete understanding of what they were actually supporting.

So I asked Ruby what she thought the organization did.

When she answered, I was relieved. She understood enough that I only had to sharpen the language a little. Given her study of energy, wellness, and connection, she already knew something essential: there is no caring for children without caring for the adults who care for them.

From there, the conversation stopped being business and became something else. We talked about motherhood, the collective consciousness, and whatever else was waiting for us that afternoon. At the end of lunch, she gave me a rock that reminded her of the organization. I promised to make sure she always knew what the organization was doing next.

Technically, it started as a business lunch. Years later, Ruby admitted she had only agreed to it because she hoped it might get her closer to the founder.

Instead, she got me.

We came together, each wanting something else, and ended up with a friendship that has long outlasted my time with that organization. We were not friends first. We are friends now, and I suspect we will be for the rest of this timeline.

Today, after taking myself out for lunch and coffee following a weekend mostly spent in bed, I kept thinking about that first meal with Ruby. About how we revealed a little of our light to one another, and how far that light has gone since.

Ruby is where the idea of Cancer Sharks came from.

Before the surgeries. Before the treatments. Before any version of this life rolled out, she invited me to let shark magic in. To let it do its work. To rid my body of the melanoma. To keep swimming, playing, and finding fun with the person I am now.

Through the pain, loss, and exhaustion, I still coax myself into seeing me as a sleek, sexy shark moving through the tides with her most vulnerable spot leading the way.

So far, this vision has carried me.

Which has me wondering something I don’t quite trust (yet). Maybe even though melanoma is a bitch, and even though the way we met was violent and terrifying, there may still come a kind of calm in our entanglement. Maybe not friendship. That may be asking too much.

But there was a time I would have said the same thing about Ruby and me. And I was wrong.

Now I understand: sometimes getting it wrong is how I get right.

There was this storm by our home a week ago, and when we went to our field to run the dogs the next day, a tree that clearly stood in the center of this field for more than 100 years, finally had enough. While awfully sad, it was also a beautiful reminder that nothing is permanent.

P.S. - Ruby has gone by a number of names since we first met. What hasn’t changed is her incredible offerings. If you want to learn more about working with her, let me know, and I can connect you with her team.

When I sold my home last year, I got rid of a lot. Furniture, old notebooks, middle school MASH games, high school notes, even my own baby clothes. Once I had to face my mortality more directly, every object started to feel like one more chore I might be leaving behind for someone I love.

Then I moved in with Todd.

And, for a brief and deeply unfair stretch, I brought that same energy into his house.

Todd has lived here for more than twenty years. He raised both of his now-adult children here. The house itself is old by Massachusetts standards, which is to say, very old. There is history in the walls, in the floors, in the objects, in the dust, and in the many beloved dogs and other animals that have also called this place home.

To say this house carries memory would be putting it lightly.

It has also been a very long time since I lived with anyone. Really lived with them.

The plan had been to stay in the Andover house I bought on my own until Briggs finished high school. Instead came legal divorce, career disruption, a brief and chaotic moment in entrepreneurship, late-stage cancer, and the financial toxicity that follows. Selling that house was the only practical choice. Emotionally, moving fifty miles south of Briggs just as he started high school has been far harder than I am usually willing to admit.

The first day of real packing in Andover, he told me it was “really hard” to know that Todd mattered more than him.

That one gutted me.

I also told him I understood why it felt true, and how sorry I was that I could not keep our life in that neighborhood going on my own any longer.

I forced myself to count the exchange as a parenting win that he could say something so clear and honest to me, even knowing it would hurt. I didn’t have the kind of courage with anyone as a teenager, never mind my parents. That didn’t make it hurt any less.

Todd and I have lived together since September, or around then. We’re bad with dates. There has not been much of a honeymoon period. I’ve been in treatment. Briggs is far away, so I drive constantly. Zara is not always particularly kind to Todd’s son Julian. Everyone in this house, human and canine, has been adjusting.

And while Todd’s house is much bigger than mine was, it was already full before I got here. He is a collector. So are his kids. From the start, I was welcome to bring whatever I wanted, but the truth is, making room has been an ongoing project.

That part has been harder than I expected.

I keep trying to get rid of more things because I think less stuff will make me feel less overwhelmed. I am often jealous of minimalists. I imagine their homes are easier to maintain, easier to breathe in, easier to keep peaceful.

Sadly, though, I am not a minimalist. Neither is anyone who’s ever lived here.

I am not especially materialistic, but I am whimsical. I love color. I love strange things, handmade things, one-of-a-kind things, objects that carry a story or a mood. Objects that make me laugh. My ADHD brain loves to pretend I would be calmer in a cleaner, emptier space.

But I know better.

I am a maximalist.

And this past Saturday, maybe because Briggs was here for the weekend, I suddenly had the energy to make something that felt like all of ours.

I started gathering things from around the house. Small pieces of art we had made. Meaningful objects from Pastoral. Things from trips. Things that make us say, “Isn’t that cool?” I started building a collage wall in the living room-slash-library around the mounted TV. I organized books by color. I pulled together things that had been stored, forgotten, half-lost, or simply waiting.

I didn’t ask permission. I didn’t take a poll. I just built.

And as the piece came together, so did something in me.

For the first time since moving in, I felt less like I was staying in someone else’s house and more like I was helping shape a home.

I don’t know if it will ever be finished. I don’t think any home ever really is.

For a bit there, I thought surviving meant shedding everything.

And now I’m learning that living with other people means making room for what matters, and finding a way to let all of it (and us) belong.

The whole truth is that I made sure to build this collage with painter’s tape, so it’s very fragile, as you can see from a spot above. I wanted to make sure it was easily removable, should it turn out not to be to Todd’s taste. He loves it and me just the way we are.

1. My son, Briggs, used to play street pickleball with me in front of our house in Andover. By “play,” I mean we batted a pickleball back and forth in the street and made up our own rules.

2. The old me never officially played. I have a hard time returning to things I did before becoming a Cancer Shark. Writing is one of them. Even though I know it helps, it hurts too. I still catch myself feeling like my shot to do something meaningful with it has already passed. I like that there is no former pickleball Amanda to compare myself to. I love that she doesn’t exist.

3. It gives me a set place to be every Monday evening that is not the hospital and not the sixty-two-mile drive between Bridgewater and Billerica.

4. It is fun to learn something new that has nothing to do with disease or medication.

Every hit, step, serve, return, and whatever comes before a dink carries a little awkwardness. The word “dink” is so awkward I can’t even bring myself to say it out loud. I do not like feeling awkward. Flow is much better. But awkward is still better than lost.

There is hope in awkward.
Lost just feels gone.

During last week’s lesson, the instructor asked me to hit the ball straight across from where I was standing. Every time I aimed straight, the ball drifted off. After a few tries, I finally asked what I was doing wrong.

He told me there was nothing mechanically wrong with my approach.

“It’s your perspective of straight,” he said. “Aim for what you think is the left end of the net.”

So I did.

And the ball went straight.

He smiled. “It’s not your approach. It’s your perspective.”

That one landed harder than the ball.

Because the truth is, my perspective does get in my way. Not all the time. Not in every area. But often enough that I know it when I see it. Or maybe often enough that I know it when I miss it.

And while it may sound simple to shift perspective, for me, that often feels as far-fetched as curing Stage IV melanoma. Especially when the shift required is toward self-compassion, forgiveness, or even just giving myself the benefit of the doubt.

Still, far-fetched beats impossible.

So maybe the win is not that I hit the ball straight. Maybe the win is that I stayed long enough to learn that straight was not where I thought it was.

Maybe the win is that the awkwardness did not scare me off.

Maybe the win, at least for now, is that I am still willing to stand in the wrong position, listen, adjust, and go again.

I can’t honestly say that feels like enough.
But I can admit it feels like something.
And something is better than gone.

I excel at hiding my mediocrity.

In high school, I played varsity field hockey all four years, which sounds impressive until I tell the whole truth: the school had just launched girls’ soccer, and not enough athletes signed up to fill both teams. I made varsity mostly by default.

That became my pattern. I made varsity by default in every season and joined track only after I was cut in the first round of softball tryouts.

The track coach took everyone: the potheads, the outcasts, and the performative overachievers like me who couldn’t stand being left out. He didn’t care if I was fast. He cared if I showed up. Sometimes I didn’t. The 400 was brutal. I would hit a wall before the finish, legs thick and unresponsive, lungs clawing for air, come in last, and still throw up. Hiding in the locker room was easier, and I often took the easy way out.

He never kicked me off. When I did show up, he cheered like I actually had a shot. A few times, I let myself believe him.

One afternoon, I decided to run home from practice.

Our school was too small and underfunded for a real track. We lapped the building and ran through town. My house was fifteen minutes by car, up a steep hill between two small New Hampshire towns. I didn’t tell anyone because I didn’t want witnesses if I quit early or failed.

Cathedral Road wasn’t built for pseudo-runners like me. It’s made of wide turns, endless pines, and a punishing hill. I ran without music. My sneakers tapped against the pavement. I played a game with the trees: run three, jog two, walk one. Up the hill, I mostly walked, tasting the dry, stale heat of my mouth, counting telephone poles like they were proof of courage. When the road tilted down again, I flew.

I remember the cold air, the ache in my side, and the look on my mother’s face when I burst through the door, red and grinning.

She was more surprised than impressed.

“I made it. I need a ride back to get my stuff.”

She was annoyed. I was supposed to call her twenty minutes before pickup. I was the oldest of four girls.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I just decided to run home. I don’t know why. But I’m beat. Can you please drive me back? I have homework.”

I always had homework.

She drove me, unhappily, and waited as I raced inside. My coach was furious I had disappeared, but when I told him, “If I’d said it out loud, I don’t think I would’ve done it,” he nodded.

Thirty years later, long after I stopped pretending to be an athlete, I had another wild idea. I would run a 5K.

It was the Patrick Mulligan Memorial 5K, honoring an EMT who had died by suicide.

This time it was five months after emergency brain surgery for Stage IV melanoma. After months of immunotherapy. After losing my adrenal glands, the small organs that quietly make the hormone most people rely on to stand up in the morning without thinking about it. My body no longer does that on its own.

Before cancer, I was strong in measurable ways. My trainer and I tracked it in pounds and reps and neat upward graphs. No matter how much more I could lift, or run, or lose, I rarely gave myself credit in real time.

Because I excel at my own mediocrity.

Survival changed that.

I resent the new bar so much that I avoid pictures from before. I interrupt thoughts about the future. Expecting things to work out feels greedy.

I didn’t die. And still, I have this nagging ache to do more, be more, have more. There’s a part of me that understands there are no more guarantees. No extensions. No races. And a far more human part that still wants them anyway.

There is an ableist in me that feels wasteful not using the body, energy, and mind I still have. I have lived my entire life in a culture that invoices worth. So surviving feels like a debt forever in collections.

Without training or planning, I signed up for the race on my forty-fourth birthday. The idea of lining up with people who train on purpose felt almost arrogant. Making it through medical catastrophe is not a qualifier.

I wasn’t trying to compete. I was trying to blend.

I signed up my teenage son, Briggs, and me.

I got the date wrong. The race was Sunday, not Saturday. Briggs had baseball.

I almost used it as an excuse to stay home. My body is not predictable anymore. Some mornings I wake up steady. Most mornings, I wake up already tired.

Then I thought about Cathedral Road. The hill. The hiding. The coach who did not care if I was any good.

I thought about being alive.

So, I went.

My goals were simple.

Show up.
Thank the organizers.
Finish.

The morning was gray and wet. Before the race started, I spoke with Patrick’s aunt. She told me about her nephew and the scholarship in his name.

I told her about brain surgery, treatment, and the slow crawl back to feeling worthy of life.

When the horn sounded, I moved with the pack. Not sprinting. Steady. I felt the tug in my side and waited for panic. It did not come.

Run three. Jog two. Walk one.

My breath found its rhythm, lost it, found it again. I walked when I needed to. Picked up when I could. My legs grew heavy in the honest way bodies grow heavy when they have done enough.

The course smelled of pine and rain and thawing earth. I wasn’t a runner, but I belonged among the living.

Even mediocre is alive.

When I crossed the finish line, I didn’t check my time. I knew I’d allow the number to shrink the moment, so I simply avoided it.

Patrick’s mother waited near the end. She smiled the way people do when we learn to keep smiling through heartbreak. We hugged. Our griefs recognized each other without comparison.

Then I drove home, asked my son how baseball went, and took a nap.

I’ve been forced to give up the façade of being what the brutalist in me still considers accomplished.

Now, it’s about reconciling how it feels to keep showing up, again and again.

Until I really can’t.

Last night was fun, in the way being a Patriots fan during the biggest games always is. I spent my childhood never feeling moments like that, then much of my twenties expecting them, and then, sadly, another drought.

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