Before I tell you about my journey, I want to speak to the women, friends, and family of those who may have just heard the words no one is ever prepared for:
“You have breast cancer.”
There is no perfect way to receive news like that. No graceful reaction. No correct timeline for processing it.
Some women cry immediately. Some go completely numb. Some begin researching, organizing, planning, and calling doctors. Some stare at the wall in silence because the mind simply cannot absorb something so life-changing all at once.
However you reacted— or are reacting— is human.
One of the hardest parts of a diagnosis is that the world keeps moving while your own suddenly feels divided into before and after. People still answer emails. Cars still drive by. Dinner still needs to be made. And meanwhile, inside your body, fear is trying to rewrite the future before you’ve even had time to breathe.
But this is what I want you to know: You do not have to survive the entire journey in one day.
You cope one moment at a time. One appointment at a time. One conversation at a time. One act of love at a time.
You let people help you. You allow yourself to feel frightened without believing fear is the final outcome. You focus on what is in front of you instead of trying to solve every unknown at once. And most importantly, you remember that a diagnosis is not the end of who you are.
You are still yourself. Still worthy of beauty. Still worthy of softness. Still worthy of hope.
This is my experience of one of the hardest phone calls I ever had to make. Those moments in life when you become a child again.
It does not matter how old you are.
It does not matter how many businesses you have built, how many crises you have managed, how many times you have walked into a room and handled yourself like the woman everyone believes you to be.
There are moments when you simply want your mother.
And then there are moments when the one thing you have to do is tell your mother something no mother should ever have to hear.
I had breast cancer.
Even now, all these years later, I can remember the weight of those words before I said them out loud. They sat inside me like stones. Heavy. Cold. Impossible to arrange into a sentence.
I had already heard the diagnosis. I had already watched the doctor’s mouth move, already tried to listen while my mind ran ahead of me into every dark corner. Surgery. Treatment. What if. How long. Why me. What now.
But somehow, none of that felt as frightening as telling my mother.
Because once I told her, it would become even more real.
And because I knew exactly what would happen.
She would try to be strong for me.
I would try to be strong for her.
And between the two of us, there would be this terrible thing neither of us could fix with love.
I remember holding the phone and staring at it far longer than necessary. As if the phone itself had become dangerous. As if once I picked it up, my life would tilt permanently in a direction I could not control.
I rehearsed the words.
“Mom, I have something to tell you.”
Too dramatic.
“Mom, the doctor found something.”
Too vague.
“Mom, I’m going to be fine.”
A lie I desperately wanted to be true, but did not yet know.
Finally, I called.
The sound of her voice nearly undid me.
There she was — my mother — ordinary, familiar, unaware. She answered the way mothers do, as if the world were still normal. As if I were calling to ask what time dinner was, or to complain about something irritating, or to tell her some ridiculous story from my day.
And for one split second, I wanted to pretend that was why I had called.
I wanted to talk about anything else.
The weather.
A blouse.
Someone’s bad manners.
Whether I was eating enough.
Anything but cancer.
But there are some sentences that will not let you avoid them forever.
“Mom,” I said, and my voice sounded strange to me. Smaller. Younger.
She heard it immediately.
“What is it?”
That is the thing about mothers. You can spend your whole life trying to sound composed, and they can still hear the tremble underneath the polish.
I took a breath.
“I have breast cancer.”
There was silence.
Not ordinary silence. Not the kind where someone is thinking of what to say. This was a silence that seemed to stop time. I could feel her receiving the words. I could feel them traveling from me to her, doing what words like that do — changing the room she was standing in, changing the day, changing both of us.
Then she said my name.
Just my name.
And in that one word was everything: fear, love, disbelief, grief, and the fierce instinct of a mother who would have traded places with me in an instant if God, science, or the universe had allowed it.
I tried to rescue her from the pain I had just caused.
“It’s early,” I said quickly. “They found it early. I have good doctors. I’m going to do what I have to do.”
Listen to me, I thought. Managing the announcement like a press conference. Turning my own cancer into bullet points so my mother would not fall apart.
But my mother was quiet.
Then she said, “I’m coming.”
Not “Do you need me?”
Not “Should I come?”
Not “Tell me what to do.”
Just: “I’m coming.”
And that was when I broke.
Because until that moment, I had been performing bravery. I had been walking around inside the costume of a woman who could handle this. I had been making calls, gathering information, sounding reasonable, asking intelligent questions, doing what women do when life hands them something unbearable: we organize.
But when my mother said, “I’m coming,” I was no longer the woman with a diagnosis.
I was her daughter.
And I was scared.
I cried then — not politely, not beautifully, not in the soft cinematic way people cry in movies. I cried from the oldest part of myself. The part that still believed my mother’s presence could make the monster go away.
She cried too, though she tried not to let me hear it.
That may have been the most heartbreaking part.
I could hear her trying to protect me from her fear, while I was trying to protect her from mine. Two women, mother and daughter, standing on opposite ends of the same terrible sentence, each pretending to be stronger than she felt.
I remember thinking: this is what love does. It does not always know how to cure. It does not always know what to say. Sometimes love simply stands there, trembling, refusing to leave.
My mother wanted details. Mothers always want details. What did the doctor say? What stage? What happens next? Who is going with you? Are you eating? Did you sleep? Why didn’t you call me sooner?
And beneath every question was the one she did not ask:
How do I keep you safe?
I did not have an answer.
So I gave her the only thing I could.
“I need you to believe I’m going to be okay,” I said.
And she did.
Or at least she made me believe she did.
That is another thing mothers do. They lend you faith when your own has gone missing.
After we hung up, I sat very still. The room around me looked exactly the same, which felt almost insulting. How could the furniture not know? How could the walls not understand that something enormous had just happened?
I had said the words.
My mother knew.
And somehow, I was still there.
That was the beginning of a lesson I would learn again and again: we survive things first by saying them out loud. Then by letting someone love us through them.
Years later, when I think back on breast cancer, I remember the doctors, the appointments, the fear, the treatment, and the strange betrayal of my own body.
But I also remember my mother’s voice.
I remember the silence after I told her.
I remember her saying my name.
I remember “I’m coming.”
And I remember that even in the most frightening moment of my life, I was not alone.
Cancer took many things from me, but it also revealed something I will never forget: beneath all the sophistication, all the competence, all the carefully constructed strength, we are still human beings who need to be held by the people who first taught us what love feels like.
And for me, in that moment, love sounded like my mother on the other end of the phone, trying not to cry, already on her way.
If you are reading this while navigating your own diagnosis — or while loving someone through theirs — I hope you remember this:
Coping does not mean pretending you are fearless. It means continuing forward even while afraid.
Some days coping looks strong. Other days it looks like crying in the shower, calling your mother, sitting quietly with a friend, or allowing yourself to rest when your body asks for gentleness.
There is no prize for carrying pain alone.
Healing is not only medical — it is emotional, spiritual, relational. It is letting people sit beside you when life becomes uncertain and strangely, even in the darkest moments, there can still be beauty. Not because cancer is beautiful. But because love becomes louder. Priorities become clearer. The small things suddenly matter again.
That understanding eventually became part of why I created Gleem Beauty. Not from perfection. Not from vanity. But from a desire for comfort, gentleness, and care during a time when my skin — and my spirit — both felt fragile.
So if today you are overwhelmed, frightened, or uncertain, please hear this from someone who has stood in that place:
You are allowed to take this one breath at a time. You are allowed to lean on people. You are allowed to hope and no matter how lonely the diagnosis may feel in the beginning, you do not have to walk through it alone.