Andrea Gibson

speaker

930 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Jan 2025 last heard 3 Mar

Andrea Gibson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 1.

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We Can Do Hard Things · The Bravest Conversation We’ve Had: Andrea Gibson (Best Of) · 26 Jan 2025 podcast

Yes. Like, absolutely. All of these things. All of those things I would do. But when I got diagnosed, all of that stopped. And the first thing I realized that my whole life, there was grief underneath that anxiety that ultimately under all of that was a fear of not being connected, a fear of dying because of fear of losing everyone that I loved.

So anyway, I've not had a lot of fear through this time. And so I read it. I see how everything in my body calms down. I go to grief and over the next three days before I talk to my doctor, I probably spent about eight hours solid every day singing Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah at the top of my lungs.

I just sang it over and over and over, except I would take breaks every now and then to scream, to scream, you are not going to break my fucking spirit to everything that hurt. Like I would just walk through the house screaming, you are not going to break my fucking spirit. Then I would dance to Ain't Nothing Gonna Break My Stride. which is such a great song.

People think it's so nerdy, but it's so good. And I was surprised. The thing that I was surprised by, and I think the thing that I've wanted to share, is that my whole life I had this terror. My whole life I had this idea that as soon as I got news like this, that I would just be in a cave all curled up and devastated and and having no access to joy.

And the thing that I've learned through these last two years is, God, I wasted so much time fearing the emotions that I would have in the future. And that fear that I had in the past is far more than what I'm experiencing right now. The present moment is far more doable than the future or the past. And so that happened. And then when I got in the doctorate,

I'm not someone who has historically been a big fan of Western medicine or big pharma or any of that. I've had a lot of questions about that. But when I first got diagnosed and they said, do chemo, I was like, this is what I'm doing. I'm going to just listen to what they say to do. And doing that has kept me alive for two years. And so I don't want to throw all of that out. I respect it.

I have loved my doctors. I've had two women oncologists at this point and both of them I loved. When I left my other doctor, it was almost like going through a breakup because I just adore them. But when I got into the appointment, it was so disheartening. It was like, these are your options. You can try these clinical trials.

They'll work in some people, or you can just choose to kind of live out the rest of your life and not be a cancer patient. And I don't want to say it's definitely terminal right away, just because they're saying it's incurable. For many people, they can still do treatments over time that can keep you alive for a while. They just come with

pretty harsh, um, side effects and some of them can be frightening. So my partner, my best friend are in that room with me. My partner is crying. I'm trying to almost wrestle my best friend because she's so mad at the energy of all the, what she's calling doom. And, um, But I just is like, I was like, this is part of it. I have to take this in and I have to hear this.

And I also have to sit here with compassion for this woman who is having to share this news with me and the nobility of a job like that and taking that on. And yeah, I felt a lot of love for her. And yeah. And then I walked out and I said, that is, and I know the odds that this is probably what's going to happen. And also I believe in miracles and magic.

I believe in alternative treatments, even though Western medicine doesn't, my doctor will say it's not going to do anything. And, and so far she'd be right because I get a lot of feedback from people saying, you should try this, you should try this, you should try this. And, and yeah,

My life is, I've been doing many of those treatments alongside of chemotherapy, which I think is why I had such an easy time with chemo. It struck me how easy it was. Through these last two years, I felt stronger and healthier in my body than I think I have since I was a teenager. So that's it.

So I have always said that Meg, we've been together for eight years, and I've always said that anxiety is a foreign language I have to translate for her. She does not know how to worry. She doesn't know how to worry.

What are you doing? Wasting your life, not worrying.

And so she really hasn't worried much throughout these last two years. She's like, it is not right in front of us right now that you were dying. And also it's not right in front of us right now that you're suffering. And because I wasn't, I wasn't suffering. I'll tell you when I did suffer, when I got the common cold, people make t-shirts and People make t-shirts that say fuck cancer.

I got the common cold right after chemo and it lasted 11 weeks because my immune system was so weakened at that point. I wanted to make a t-shirt that said fuck the common cold. My partner, my partner. She is heartbroken right now. She's in a lot of of grief and she's sort of floaty in a way that maybe I was in the very beginning, because from the very beginning, I thought, um,

this is very likely to kill me. And I had just written a book where I wrote a book and I thought to myself, I want to write about people in this book in the way that I would if I never got a chance to speak about what I think about people again.

Like I want to write people in their full humanity because I was watching our world sort of come to a place of this is, you know, people are bad or good, right or wrong. And I wanted to write something more whole. But my partner, she's wonderful. And it's been mostly us for two years. I have a gigantic community of friends.

But for some reason, this time has been very insular, the most insular time in my life, partially because of the pandemic and because we had to be more quarantined than other people because I was at risk. But she's been incredible from the beginning. She was the one when I initially woke up from surgery. She was sitting right beside me. She was sitting beside my mom.

And she was the one that told me I had cancer. And she said it so beautifully. I wrote a poem about it. I said anyone who thinks poetry is frivolous has never had to have someone tell them something unspeakably hard beautifully. And yeah. And but right now. We're. We're a little floaty and she more than me. And grieving and also keeping our hearts open to miracles.

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