Suleika Jaouad

And this time, I didn't have treatment protocols or discharge instructions to help guide my way forward.

But what I did have was an inbox full of internet messages from strangers.

Over the years, people from all over the world had read my column, and they'd responded with letters, comments and emails.

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

I got a lot of unsolicited advice about how to cure my cancer with things like essential oils.

I got some questions about my bra size, but mostly ...

Mostly, I heard from people who, in their own different way, understood what it was that I was going through.

I heard from a teenage girl in Florida who, like me, was coming out of chemo and wrote me a message composed largely of emojis.

I heard from a retired art history professor in Ohio named Howard, who'd spent most of his life struggling with a mysterious, debilitating health condition that he'd had from the time he was a young man.

I heard from an inmate on death row in Texas by the name of Little GQ, short for Gangster Quinn.

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

He does a thousand push-ups to start off each morning, but he related to what I described in one column as my encanceration and to the experience of being confined to a tiny fluorescent room.

I know that our situations are different, he wrote to me, but the threat of death lurks in both of our shadows.

In those lonely first weeks and months of my recovery, these strangers and their words became lifelines, dispatches from people of so many different backgrounds with so many different experiences, all showing me the same thing.

You can be held hostage by the worst thing that's ever happened to you and allow it to hijack your remaining days, or you can find a way forward.

I knew I needed to make some kind of change.

I wanted to be in motion again, to figure out how to unstuck myself and to get back out into the world.

And so I decided to go on a real journey, not the bullshit cancer one or the mythical hero's journey that everyone thought I should be on, but a real pack-your-bags kind of journey.

I put everything I owned into storage, rented out my apartment, borrowed a car and talked a very dear but somewhat smelly friend into joining me.

Together, my dog Oscar and I embarked on a 15,000-mile road trip around the United States.