(Starting Note: I’m listening to an Abba Album on repeat, swaying to Fernando!)

A while back – before the holiday spin overtook my brain with turkey, mashed potatoes and bottles of champagne, I received an interesting email from Kristi Harrison, founder of the “Life Changes Foundation” which is raising awareness after the diagnosis of Kristi’s friend, Katie Morris Kyser, who was diagnosed with breast cancer.

Krisiti’s concept of Life Changes is really interesting, particularly since ‘new normal’ and losing the person we were before diagnosis is often discussed online. The fact is, life changes – we cannot go back and for me, before engaging in Kristi’s project, ‘back there’ was a place of innocence lost and reality biting very hard. Okay, yes, I have SO MANY wonderful memories before being diagnosed that I cherish (for instance, the ‘how we met’ story with my husband that is excessively romantic and entirely over-shared). But if I cling to who I was before diagnosis, it makes me sad about who I became immediately after. I guess that’s because the experience held was more physically and emotionally painful than anything I’d ever dealt with in my life. And once felt you can’t go back, so I prefer to look forward and punch things out occasionally.

But then Kristi challenged me with the project she’s leading that focuses on writing letters to your 14-year-old self. She asked if I would get involved by writing a letter. (Hello, write about myself? Challenge accepted!)

The adventure of high school. I’m bottom right.

What surprised me in writing the letter is that I still love the girl who was once 14. She doesn’t make me sad, even though her style choices are *ahem* regrettable. In fact, she makes me look forward to having a daughter. Isn’t that weird?  She doesn’t fill me with loss or a mourning sensation . . . I’m simply proud of her and know she’ll be okay despite anything and everything.  And if she’ll be okay, then maybe I’ll be okay too.

Perhaps ‘new normal’ is really just a point (a point that happens and again and again and again) on the continuum of life? And we’ll all be okay, despite whatever crap we encounter – even death. I have to have faith that whatever happens after is just what is meant to be, we’ll go back where we came from, and be whatever we were before. AH! I’m going too deep. No excessive philosophizing will be tolerated on a blog entitled “BumpyBOOBS”

(Okay, I turned off the Abba because those previous 2 paragraphs were deep, and I can’t do deep with Abba. However, I’m now turning it back on.)

So, if you are interesting in joining Kristi’s project, you can find her Facebook page right here: https://www.facebook.com/LifeChangesFoundation

Get in touch. See what happens. 🙂

And now the moment you’ve totally been waiting for (righhhht), the letter to my 14 year old self. Enjoy!

Click to read the letter at the Life Changes Foundation page! I laughed like an idiot while writing this.