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It was the spring of 2011,

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and as they like to say
in commencement speeches,

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I was getting ready
to enter the real world.

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I had recently graduated from college

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and moved to Paris to start my first job.

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My dream was to become
a war correspondent,

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but the real world that I found

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took me into a really different
kind of conflict zone.

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At 22 years old,

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I was diagnosed with leukemia.

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The doctors told me
and my parents, point-blank,

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that I had about a 35 percent chance
of long-term survival.

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I couldn't wrap my head around
what that prognosis meant.

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But I understood that the reality
and the life I'd imagined for myself

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had shattered.

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Overnight, I lost my job,
my apartment, my independence,

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and I became patient number 5624.

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Over the next four years
of chemo, a clinical trial

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and a bone marrow transplant,

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the hospital became my home,

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my bed, the place I lived 24/7.

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Since it was unlikely
that I'd ever get better,

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I had to accept my new reality.

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And I adapted.

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I became fluent in medicalese,

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made friends with a group
of other young cancer patients,

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built a vast collection of neon wigs

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and learned to use
my rolling IV pole as a skateboard.

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I even achieved my dream
of becoming a war correspondent,

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although not in the way I'd expected.

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It started with a blog,

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reporting from the front lines
of my hospital bed,

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and it morphed into a column
I wrote for the New York Times,

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called "Life, Interrupted."

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But --
(Applause)

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Thank you.

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(Applause)

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But above all else,

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my focus was on surviving.

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And -- spoiler alert --

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(Laughter)

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I did survive, yeah.

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(Applause)

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Thanks to an army of supportive humans,

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I'm not just still here,
I am cured of my cancer.

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(Applause)

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Thank you.

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(Applause)

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So, when you go through
a traumatic experience like this,

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people treat you differently.

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They start telling you
how much of an inspiration you are.

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They say you're a warrior.

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They call you a hero,

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someone who's lived
the mythical hero's journey,

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who's endured impossible trials

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and, against the odds,
lived to tell the tale,

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returning better and braver
for what you're been through.

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And this definitely lines up
with my experience.

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Cancer totally transformed my life.

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I left the hospital knowing
exactly who I was

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and what I wanted to do in the world.

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And now, every day as the sun rises,

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I drink a big glass of celery juice,

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and I follow this up
with 90 minutes of yoga.

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Then, I write down 50 things
I'm grateful for onto a scroll of paper

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that I fold into an origami crane
and send sailing out my window.

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(Laughter)

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Are you seriously believing any of this?

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(Laughter)

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I don't do any of these things.

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(Laughter)

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I hate yoga, and I have no idea
how to fold an origami crane.

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The truth is that for me,

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the hardest part of my cancer experience
began once the cancer was gone.

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That heroic journey
of the survivor we see in movies

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and watch play out on Instagram --

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it's a myth.

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It isn't just untrue, it's dangerous,

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because it erases the very real
challenges of recovery.

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Now, don't get me wrong --
I am incredibly grateful to be alive,

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and I am painfully aware
that this struggle is a privilege

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that many don't get to experience.

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But it's important that I tell you

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what this projection of heroism
and expectation of constant gratitude

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does to people who are trying to recover.

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Because being cured is not
where the work of healing ends.

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It's where it begins.

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I'll never forget the day
I was discharged from the hospital,

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finally done with treatment.

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Those four years of chemo
had taken a toll on my relationship

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with my longtime boyfriend,

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and he'd recently moved out.

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And when I walked
into my apartment, it was quiet.

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Eerily so.

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The person I wanted to call
in this moment,

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the person who I knew
would understand everything,

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was my friend Melissa.

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She was a fellow cancer patient,

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but she had died three weeks earlier.

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As I stood there in the doorway
of my apartment,

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I wanted to cry.

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But I was too tired to cry.

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The adrenaline was gone.

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I had felt as if the inner scaffolding

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that had held me together
since my diagnosis

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had suddenly crumbled.

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I had spent the past 1,500 days
working tirelessly to achieve one goal:

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to survive.

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And now that I'd done so,

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I realized I had absolutely
no idea how to live.

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On paper, of course, I was better:

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I didn't have leukemia,

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my blood counts were back to normal,

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and the disability checks
soon stopped coming.

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To the outside world,

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I clearly didn't belong in the kingdom
of the sick anymore.

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But in reality, I never felt
further from being well.

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All that chemo had taken
a permanent physical toll on my body.

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I wondered, "What kind of job can I hold

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when I need to nap for four hours
in the middle of the day?

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When my misfiring immune system

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still sends me to the ER
on a regular basis?"

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And then there were the invisible,
psychological imprints

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my illness had left behind:

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the fears of relapse,

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the unprocessed grief,

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the demons of PTSD that descended upon me
for days, sometimes weeks.

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See, we talk about reentry

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in the context of war and incarceration.

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But we don't talk about it as much

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in the context of other kinds
of traumatic experiences, like an illness.

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Because no one had warned me
of the challenges of reentry,

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I thought something must be wrong with me.

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I felt ashamed,

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and with great guilt,
I kept reminding myself

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of how lucky I was to be alive at all,

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when so many people
like my friend Melissa were not.

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But on most days, I woke up
feeling so sad and lost,

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I could barely breathe.

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Sometimes, I even fantasized
about getting sick again.

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And let me tell you,

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there are so many better things
to fantasize about

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when you're in your twenties
and recently single.

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(Laughter)

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But I missed the hospital's ecosystem.

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Like me, everyone in there was broken.

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But out here, among the living,
I felt like an impostor,

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overwhelmed and unable to function.

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I also missed the sense of clarity
I'd felt at my sickest.

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Staring your mortality straight in the eye
has a way of simplifying things,

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of rerouting your focus
to what really matters.

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And when I was sick,
I vowed that if I survived,

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it had to be for something.

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It had to be to live a good life,
an adventurous life,

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a meaningful one.

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But the question, once I was cured,

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became: How?

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I was 27 years old
with no job, no partner, no structure.

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And this time, I didn't have treatment
protocols or discharge instructions

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to help guide my way forward.

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But what I did have was an in-box
full of internet messages

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from strangers.

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Over the years,

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people from all over the world
had read my column,

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and they'd responded with letters,
comments and emails.

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It was a mix, as is often
the case, for writers.

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I got a lot of unsolicited advice

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about how to cure my cancer
with things like essential oils.

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I got some questions about my bra size.

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But mostly --

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(Laughter)

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mostly, I heard from people who,
in their own different way,

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understood what it was
that I was going through.

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I heard from a teenage girl in Florida

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who, like me, was coming out of chemo

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and wrote me a message
composed largely of emojis.

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I heard from a retired art history
professor in Ohio named Howard,

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who'd spent most of his life

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struggling with a mysterious,
debilitating health condition

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that he'd had from the time
he was a young man.

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I heard from an inmate
on death row in Texas

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by the name of Little GQ --

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short for "Gangster Quinn."

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He'd never been sick a day in his life.

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He does 1,000 push-ups
to start off each morning.

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But he related to what
I described in one column

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as my "incanceration,"

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and to the experience of being confined
to a tiny fluorescent room.

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"I know that our situations
are different," he wrote to me,

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"But the threat of death
lurks in both of our shadows."

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In those lonely first weeks
and months of my recovery,

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these strangers and their words
became lifelines,

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dispatches from people
of so many different backgrounds,

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with so many different experiences,

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all showing me the same thing:

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you can be held hostage

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by the worst thing
that's ever happened to you

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and allow it to hijack
your remaining days,

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or you can find a way forward.

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I knew I needed to make
some kind of change.

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I wanted to be in motion again

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to figure out how to unstuck myself
and to get back out into the world.

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And so I decided to go on
a real journey --

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not the bullshit cancer one

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or the mythical hero's journey
that everyone thought I should be on,

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but a real, pack-your-bags
kind of journey.

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I put everything I owned into storage,

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rented out my apartment, borrowed a car

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and talked a very a dear
but somewhat smelly friend

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into joining me.

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00:11:44,890 --> 00:11:47,342
(Laughter)

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00:11:47,366 --> 00:11:52,917
Together, my dog Oscar and I
embarked on a 15,000-mile road trip

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around the United States.

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Along the way, we visited some
of those strangers who'd written to me.

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I needed their advice,

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also to say to them, thank you.

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I went to Ohio and stayed with Howard,
the retired professor.

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When you've suffered a loss or a trauma,

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the impulse can be to guard your heart.

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But Howard urged me
to open myself up to uncertainty,

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to the possibilities
of new love, new loss.

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Howard will never be cured of illness.

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And as a young man, he had no way
of predicting how long he'd live.

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But that didn't stop him
from getting married.

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Howard has grandkids now,

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and takes weekly ballroom dancing
lessons with his wife.

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When I visited them,

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they’d recently celebrated
their 50th anniversary.

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In his letter to me, he'd written,

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"Meaning is not found
in the material realm;

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it's not in dinner, jazz,
cocktails or conversation.

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Meaning is what's left
when everything else is stripped away."

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I went to Texas, and I visited
Little GQ on death row.

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He asked me what I did
to pass all that time

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I'd spent in a hospital room.

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When I told him that I got
really, really good at Scrabble,

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he said, "Me, too!" and explained how,

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even though he spends most of his days
in solitary confinement,

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he and his neighboring prisoners
make board games out of paper

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and call out their plays
through their meal slots --

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a testament to the incredible tenacity
of the human spirit

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and our ability to adapt with creativity.

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And my last stop was in Florida,

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00:13:46,386 --> 00:13:49,873
to see that teenage girl
who'd sent me all those emojis.

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00:13:50,585 --> 00:13:53,727
Her name is Unique, which is perfect,

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00:13:53,751 --> 00:13:57,919
because she's the most luminous,
curious person I've ever met.

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I asked her what she wants
to do next and she said,

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00:14:01,785 --> 00:14:03,674
"I want to go to college and travel

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00:14:03,698 --> 00:14:06,831
and eat weird foods like octopus
that I've never tasted before

250
00:14:06,855 --> 00:14:08,375
and come visit you in New York

251
00:14:08,399 --> 00:14:10,303
and go camping, but I'm scared of bugs,

252
00:14:10,327 --> 00:14:12,047
but I still want to go camping."

253
00:14:13,768 --> 00:14:16,196
I was in awe of her,

254
00:14:16,220 --> 00:14:21,490
that she could be so optimistic
and so full of plans for the future,

255
00:14:21,514 --> 00:14:23,431
given everything she'd been through.

256
00:14:24,180 --> 00:14:25,855
But as Unique showed me,

257
00:14:25,879 --> 00:14:30,736
it is far more radical
and dangerous to have hope

258
00:14:30,760 --> 00:14:32,826
than to live hemmed in by fear.

259
00:14:34,699 --> 00:14:39,080
But the most important thing
I learned on that road trip

260
00:14:39,104 --> 00:14:43,283
is that the divide between
the sick and the well --

261
00:14:43,307 --> 00:14:44,680
it doesn't exist.

262
00:14:45,149 --> 00:14:47,275
The border is porous.

263
00:14:47,585 --> 00:14:49,950
As we live longer and longer,

264
00:14:49,974 --> 00:14:53,831
surviving illnesses and injuries
that would have killed our grandparents,

265
00:14:53,855 --> 00:14:55,180
even our parents,

266
00:14:55,204 --> 00:14:59,932
the vast majority of us will travel
back and forth between these realms,

267
00:14:59,956 --> 00:15:03,353
spending much of our lives
somewhere between the two.

268
00:15:04,059 --> 00:15:07,162
These are the terms of our existence.

269
00:15:08,228 --> 00:15:12,426
Now, I wish I could say
that since coming home from my road trip,

270
00:15:12,450 --> 00:15:14,577
I feel fully healed.

271
00:15:14,601 --> 00:15:15,751
I don't.

272
00:15:16,601 --> 00:15:19,227
But once I stopped expecting myself

273
00:15:19,251 --> 00:15:23,229
to return to the person
I'd been pre-diagnosis,

274
00:15:23,253 --> 00:15:28,357
once I learned to accept my body
and its limitations,

275
00:15:28,381 --> 00:15:30,613
I actually did start to feel better.

276
00:15:31,405 --> 00:15:35,254
And in the end, I think that's the trick:

277
00:15:35,278 --> 00:15:38,798
to stop seeing our health as binary,

278
00:15:38,822 --> 00:15:40,509
between sick and healthy,

279
00:15:40,533 --> 00:15:42,036
well and unwell,

280
00:15:42,060 --> 00:15:43,758
whole and broken;

281
00:15:43,782 --> 00:15:48,222
to stop thinking that there's some
beautiful, perfect state of wellness

282
00:15:48,246 --> 00:15:49,788
to strive for;

283
00:15:49,812 --> 00:15:53,695
and to quit living in a state
of constant dissatisfaction

284
00:15:53,719 --> 00:15:55,065
until we reach it.

285
00:15:56,605 --> 00:16:02,344
Every single one of us
will have our life interrupted,

286
00:16:02,368 --> 00:16:04,574
whether it's by the rip cord
of a diagnosis

287
00:16:04,598 --> 00:16:09,038
or some other kind of heartbreak
or trauma that brings us to the floor.

288
00:16:10,384 --> 00:16:15,522
We need to find ways to live
in the in-between place,

289
00:16:15,546 --> 00:16:19,665
managing whatever body
and mind we currently have.

290
00:16:20,776 --> 00:16:27,406
Sometimes, all it takes is the ingenuity
of a handmade game of Scrabble

291
00:16:27,430 --> 00:16:31,652
or finding that stripped-down
kind of meaning in the love of family

292
00:16:31,676 --> 00:16:34,268
and a night on the ballroom dance floor,

293
00:16:34,292 --> 00:16:37,212
or that radical, dangerous hope

294
00:16:37,236 --> 00:16:41,357
that I'm guessing will someday
lead a teenage girl terrified of bugs

295
00:16:41,381 --> 00:16:42,531
to go camping.

296
00:16:43,832 --> 00:16:45,697
If you're able to do that,

297
00:16:45,721 --> 00:16:49,641
then you've taken the real hero's journey.

298
00:16:49,665 --> 00:16:54,045
You've achieved what it means
to actually be well,

299
00:16:54,069 --> 00:17:00,730
which is to say: alive, in the messiest,
richest, most whole sense.

300
00:17:01,173 --> 00:17:02,923
Thank you, that's all I've got.

301
00:17:02,947 --> 00:17:05,709
(Applause)

302
00:17:05,733 --> 00:17:06,889
Thank you.

303
00:17:06,913 --> 00:17:10,095
(Applause)