The Elysia Skye Breast Cancer Organization

When I started putting this book together, I was twenty-four years old. Less than two weeks away from my twenty-fifth birthday, and eleven months after my first surgery for stage three breast cancer. It originally began as a journal when I was diagnosed. Then, as I grew more depressed and pieces of my life started to fall apart and affect me more, I stopped writing. I don’t know why. Maybe I was too sad to write. Maybe I didn’t want to remember.

I write in my journal like I’m writing to a friend, and I didn’t want to keep telling her bad news. I call her Flowerbook, she knows all my secrets, and now, so will you. (Insert cartoon like “GULP” as I really take this concept in for the first time).

When I look back at my diaries from my youth, there are gaps ranging from days to months when I was depressed. When I am upset, I cannot write. The thought of writing this book felt like a task. I didn’t want to do cancer homework. I wanted to pay my bills and eat ice cream. After putting it off for so long, I had no clue how to pick up the pieces and start again.

One magical day, when I was beating myself up for not writing, my friend Jenn, reminded me, “Anne Frank had NOTHING TO DO but write.” Which at first made me laugh and I felt terrible for it, but then it put all my guilt in perspective. I began to realize that the reason I was writing in the first place was to help and inspire other women and encourage laughter during trauma. I was certainly not accomplishing that by distracting myself with America’s Next Top Model or working overtime at my terrible job. I also began realize how important receiving help from friends is, and how my past stubbornness is perhaps one of the reasons why I got cancer in the first place (more on that later).

Most women hide away their pain; they don’t express their anger; they feel the need to be strong, and usually want to do everything themselves (because let’s face it, women are the emotionally stronger gender ☺). For some however, all of this suffering and agony can weigh down our hearts and become a sickness inside our chest. And that is a common area where we get sick, i.e.: breast cancer. This rule applies to men too, and to all men and women who get other illnesses. Wherever you store your stress, sadness and frustration in your body is where your body is creating problems, with one purpose in mind: TO GET YOU TO KNOCK IT OFF!

I am a filmmaker, an actress, a director, a producer, a survivor and finally an author. And my goal is to enlighten the women and men of today with the simplest of health tips – laugh, love and get yourself checked. That is the secret. It is THE preventative medicine. Don’t hold in your fear, your pain, your anger or anything negative. Your chest can’t handle it and this darkness spreads into your breasts. For a woman, her breasts are one of the most important parts of her body because it is part of what makes her a mother, a feminine beauty, a shapely figure different from man. When that is taken away or altered, so is the entire woman, but that too is temporary.

It took me a long time to be able to hold my head high about my new body. My breasts are fantastic, they are perfectly shaped and will never sag, but they are not the breasts I knew and loved for 24 years. I had to learn to love them, including their scars and dimples and everything else that comes with six reconstructive surgeries and radiation.

Having cancer makes you appreciate things you glanced over hundreds of times before. Like your face at an angle in a mirror, or how the tree outside your house that you may have never noticed before, is so beautiful, and how loving some parents are with their children, and how many children don’t appreciate it at all. You learn to be grateful for every inch of your skin that is healthy and unhealthy. You start to breathe more, and want to read more and see more movies. Suddenly life is fragile and everything around you is precious.

I am writing this because I am alive. Thank you for reading it.

#ingratitude