Christina Costa

You're a fighter, keep fighting, beat this tumor, were the top comments.

And then there was the internet, the place I so desperately searched for people who were doing well with their diagnosis.

But the top hashtags to search for were brain tumor suck, cancer sucks, and cancer fighter.

I understand completely why those hashtags exist, but I was so eager to find the hashtag, Hi, I have a brain tumor that might never go away, and I'm still living and thriving, and I guess there just isn't a ring to that one.

I hated the idea that I was going to be at war with my brain because I had spent months and years kissing it instead.

I hated the suggestion of naming my tumor something awful because the reality is that it was going to be my neighbor for the rest of my life.

and I hated the guided imagery training that asked me to picture chemo as an army coming to battle the cancer cells because I didn't want to spend over a year of my life at war with my own body.

I can see how these elements of the fight narrative can be empowering for people, but for me, I knew it wasn't going to work.

So I started to reference well-being practices that I had learned from my own studies.

Doctors always laugh with me when they find out that I'm a biopsych and neuroscience major and psych PhD student.

Then when they ask what I'm studying and I tell them I study resilience and well-being, they either laugh again, say something like, oh, that's irrelevant, or go, aww.

The irony was never lost on me.

I have read so many stories and studies of resilience, but I never pictured the day that I would have to personally experience it.

I read and taught about gratitude practices specifically as a well-being strategy, and even though I knew the positive effects, I had never seriously practiced them myself.

I started to incorporate some of these exercises into my life.

I tried to stop focusing on what my body had done wrong

and focus on the gratitude I had for my body instead.

And really, I realized this is something I had been doing when I was kissing my brains those days leading up to and after surgery.

Gratitude became the tool that helped me restructure my vision of illness and disability when the world was telling me I should fight it instead.

Instead of thinking about if I would be able to have kids one day, I thought of how amazing it was that my brain, despite its trauma, was able to deliver the perfect amount of hormones to my body to produce enough eggs to stay for a later date.