Mojo & The Mess has existed for a year now.
In that year, I have written through diagnoses, treatments, scans, side effects, hospital stays, fear, grief, anger, and the strange experience of watching my life become something I barely recognize while still having to wake up and live inside it every day.
I published two books.
I built something from the worst thing that ever happened to me.
I took everything cancer gave me and tried to turn it into words someone else might need. I made the ugly parts useful. I made the lonely parts feel a little less lonely. I kept moving, kept writing, kept creating, even as the cancer kept spreading.
And for most of that time, I knew I was getting worse.
I knew what the scans said. I knew what it meant when another part of my body appeared on the list. I knew the treatments were not being given to cure me. I knew my prognosis. I knew this disease was growing inside me, even during the days when I looked fine, laughed, went out, took pictures, made plans, and wrote posts that made people forget for a minute just how sick I was.
But knowing I was getting worse and feeling myself getting worse were two different things.
For a long time, I think I coasted on that difference.
The scans could say whatever they said, but I could still get up.
I could still write.
I could still go somewhere and have a normal afternoon.
I could still convince myself that the pain was manageable, the exhaustion was treatment, the headaches would settle, the swelling would go down, and the next medication might give me a little more time before this disease truly changed my life.
The cancer was getting worse, but I still felt okay enough to live around it.
I do not feel like that anymore.
I feel weaker.
I feel pain more often, in more places, and for longer stretches of time. I feel my body asking me to stop before I have even started. I feel every plan come with the question of whether I will physically be able to do it. I feel the distance between what I want to do and what my body allows getting wider.
I feel sick now.
Not just on treatment days.
Not just when a side effect hits.
Not just during the scary moments that eventually pass and let me return to something resembling normal.
I feel sick in a way that has begun following me into everything.
It is there when I wake up.
It is there when I try to get comfortable.
It is there when I make plans, when I leave the house, when I sit on the couch, when I try to sleep, and when I open my eyes the next morning already tired.
There was a time when cancer was something terrible happening inside my body, but it had not yet swallowed every part of my day.
Now I feel it taking up more space.
That is difficult to admit because I have spent so much time continuing.
Continuing has almost become part of my identity.
I continued through treatment.
I continued after the cancer spread.
I continued when I was told things nobody in their twenties should ever have to hear.
I continued through brain mets, bone pain, medications, radiation, changing plans, new symptoms, and the constant rearranging of what my life was supposed to look like.
I built Mojo & The Mess.
I wrote Life’s a Mess.
I wrote Before the Flowers Die.
I planned The Village.
I kept finding another thing to care about, another thing to create, another reason to get out of bed when my body wanted nothing more than to disappear into it.
I think part of me believed that as long as I kept creating, I was staying ahead of the cancer.
As long as I still had ideas, deadlines, chapters, posts, projects, and people counting on me, then maybe I was not really declining. Maybe the disease was growing, but I was growing around it too.
Maybe I could keep making my life bigger faster than cancer could make it smaller.
But lately, I feel the smaller part winning.
That does not mean I am giving up.
It does not mean I have stopped loving my life or wanting more of it.
It means I am tired of pretending that wanting to live is the same as feeling well enough to live the way I want.
I can want more time and still be exhausted by what that time feels like.
I can be proud of everything I have built and still feel devastated that my body is becoming less able to carry me through it.
I can be grateful that both of my books are here, that my words exist outside of me, and still hate the reason I felt such urgency to finish them.
That urgency was always there.
Even when I did not say it out loud.
I knew I was writing against a clock.
I knew there was a reason I could not leave the books unfinished. I knew there was a reason I kept pushing on days when I should have rested. Somewhere underneath all of it was the knowledge that I did not know how long I would still have the energy, focus, strength, or time to tell these stories myself.
Now both books are out.
Mojo & The Mess has been here for a year.
These things I was so desperate to bring into the world exist now.
And I am proud.
I am so proud that I made them real.
But there is something terrifying about reaching the other side of those goals and realizing the cancer is still here.
Still moving.
Still taking.
There is no finish line where I complete enough things and earn my health back.
There is no deal where I write the books, help enough people, build the community, and then get to return to the life I had before.
I did everything I could to make something beautiful from this.
And I am still getting sicker.
I think that is the truth I have been trying not to look at too closely.
I have always known what stage four means.
I have always understood the language doctors use when they talk about controlling disease instead of curing it. I have never believed positivity would save me. I have never needed anyone to lie to me about what was happening.
But there was still a distance between understanding death and feeling my body moving closer to it.
That distance made life possible.
It let me focus on what was directly in front of me.
The next blog.
The next treatment.
The next scan.
The next chapter.
The next event.
The next day I could get dressed and feel like myself.
I lived in those small stretches of time because looking at the whole thing was too much.
Now the distance feels smaller.
I feel it in my strength.
I feel it in my pain.
I feel it in how much longer it takes to recover from things that used to barely slow me down.
I feel it in the way Pete watches me.
I feel it in the moments when I know he can see I am struggling before I am ready to admit it.
I feel it when I catch myself calculating whether something is worth the energy it will take.
I feel it when I choose the couch over the life happening outside of it, not because I do not want to go, but because my body has already made the decision for me.
That loss is hard to explain.
People see the big losses in cancer.
They see the hair.
The surgeries.
The treatment.
The hospital admissions.
The scans.
They do not always see the slow disappearance of your physical freedom.
The moment standing becomes harder.
The moment pain becomes the background of every conversation.
The moment you stop assuming you will feel better tomorrow.
The moment you realize you are not recovering between the bad days anymore.
You are just having different kinds of bad days.
I do not want this to become a goodbye.
I am not writing one.
I am still here.
I am still planning The Village. I am still thinking about the next blog. I am still checking my book pages, reading messages, making graphics, laughing with Pete, loving Mojo, and finding reasons to be excited about things.
But I also need to be honest about where I am.
The whole point of Mojo & The Mess was that I would tell the truth.
Not only when the truth was powerful, beautiful, or easy to shape into something inspiring.
The truth right now is that I feel myself getting worse.
I feel weaker.
I hurt more.
I am more tired.
I do not bounce back the way I used to.
And for the first time since my diagnosis became something much bigger and much scarier, I no longer just know that I am sick.
I feel sick.
There is grief in admitting that.
There is fear too.
But there is also relief because pretending I am okay has started taking energy I no longer have to spare.
I do not want to spend whatever good moments remain trying to convince everyone that I am handling this beautifully.
Sometimes I am not handling it beautifully.
Sometimes I am angry.
Sometimes I am scared.
Sometimes I look at everything I have created and wonder how I managed to do it while my body was falling apart.
Sometimes I am proud of myself.
Sometimes I am heartbroken for myself.
Most days, I am both.
A year ago, Mojo & The Mess began because I needed somewhere to put all of this.
The fear.
The honesty.
The dark humor.
The love.
The parts of cancer people avoid because they do not know what to say.
It became bigger than I expected. It reached people I will never meet. It gave me purpose during a time when cancer was trying to reduce my life to appointments, results, and survival.
Both of my books are here now too.
They are proof that I was here.
Proof that I loved, hurt, fought to be understood, and refused to let the hardest parts of my life remain unspoken.
But this story is not over just because the books are finished.
I am still inside it.
I am just in a harder chapter now.
One where I cannot hide from what my body is telling me.
One where hope does not look like believing I will suddenly become well.
Hope looks like still finding something worth doing while I am not.
It looks like writing this.
It looks like telling the truth and trusting that it is enough.
It looks like letting myself admit that I do not feel okay anymore without turning that admission into surrender.
I am still here.
I am still me.
I am still building, loving, writing, and trying.
I am just doing it from a body that feels heavier than it did before.
And maybe this next part of Mojo & The Mess is not about proving how much I can accomplish while I am sick.
Maybe it is about learning that I do not have to accomplish anything to make my life matter.
Maybe being here is enough.
Even when being here hurts.
If you have been here from the beginning, thank you for staying through every version of this story. If you found Mojo & The Mess somewhere in the middle, thank you for walking into the mess instead of looking away.
You can subscribe to receive new posts when they are published. No pretending. No forced positivity. Just the honest version of what it means to keep living when life does not look the way you thought it would.
There is more to Mojo & The Mess than this blog.
The Blog is where I tell the parts of cancer, illness, love, grief, and survival that do not always fit inside an appointment.
The Resources page holds information and support for patients, caregivers, and the people trying to help them.
The Keep Us Going page explains the ways you can support Mojo & The Mess, the books, and the work happening behind the scenes.
And The Village is where this community is becoming something real: a free day created for cancer patients, survivors, caregivers, and their families to find resources, connection, and a place where they do not have to explain what they are carrying.
Mojo & The Mess began because I needed somewhere to tell the truth.
A year later, I am still telling it.
Even when the truth is that I do not feel okay anymore.
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