I usually don’t do cancer-oriented classes.  It’s not that I see no value in them-they help rejuvenate, orient, push people toward or help them see a new goal in their lives–lives that if anything like mine are confused, mixed up, what-the-heck is going on with me cancer lives.

The reason I don’t attend these things is that when I do I always end up feeling like a cancer victim.   I feel labeled, the feel-sorry-for-her one, the poor slob who got hit with incredible bad mojo.

So today it was unusual that I showed up at a cancer “class”–a collage for the soul, as it was called.  The point was to get in touch with the things that make you–or me–who I am.  The topics were things like community and council–but what it all boiled down to was who we were amid our cancer crisis, and who we wanted to become through it all.

At first I sat in the circle and got that get-me-outta-here feeling as the leader of the group made her introductions.  It all sounded so pitiful, so “we want to help you unlucky folks get through your rotten lives”–even though that’s not what she said.  That’s just what I heard.

Then it wast time for the 26 of us to get up and sift through the dozens of pages in front of us and pick pictures that represented us.  The prompt was things that resonated with the phrase “I am the one who..”.. which is a little hokey for me–

but a part of me was already enjoying myself.

It’s not that I loved being a cancer patient, or a qualifier for the free-to-cancer-people class, or had a burning desire to cut and paste.  It was that I was able to return to my inner child whose favorite elementary school class was art and who in the middle of what could have been a busy Saturday at my 2-kids-a-husband-a-dog-a-pile-of-laundry-and-recurrent-breast-cancer home, I was sitting in a quiet room cutting out pictures and gluing them on a card, thinking about myself the entire time.

If you’re like me, you never do that.  You’re always picking up someone else’s coat, dishes, back pack, lunch box, and trying to figure out what’s for dinner.  It never ends.

But today I was there, thinking about me, and not feeling the least bit guilty about it.

The reason I even accepted the invitation is because my dear friend Raychel invited me.  Raychel is one of those people whom I love like a sister, but I never see her.  We literally live 4 streets away from each other and I haven’t seen her since the summer time.  When she shot me an email asking if I wanted to attend this seminar, I replied in capitals YES.  It could have been a nose picking contest for all I cared, I just wanted to see Raychel.

But as we sat next to each other giggling over what we were creating and realizing what it was revealing about ourselves to us and to the others in the room, I discovered I was having a great time.

And as I reached for a photo of a little boy goofing around with a kitchen pot over his head, it hit me that when the going gets tough for this cancer girl, there is strength to be found in stepping outside my comfort zone, giving new things a try and surrounding myself with a great friend, glue and a whole bunch of giggles.