Stand Up To Cancer

My mother Laura is strong and accomplished and admired and loved by the people around her--by me, first and foremost. So many things about her are inspiring that it is assumed she is immune to emotional frailty. Hardly anyone notices that she has plenty of insecurities that she is often afraid, that she can even, on occasion, luxuriate in fear.

It's not noticeable to most people, which is just as well, but of course most people are not me. Which is to say that most people are not Laura's daughter. It's different for me, because I know. I can see: She is quietly frantic and defeated just before she gets up to speak in public. She absolutely knows that a project at work is facing certain failure. She worries often that her cancer will not stay contained.

My mother is not fearless--she's something much more important and much more inspiring: My mother is vibrantly relentless. She uses her fear, not to close off, but to open herself up further to the world. To inspire people when she's speaking in public, to approach every problem at work with a solution and the attitude that no problem (however great) is unsolvable, to overcome the feeling of threat to her sense of self, to her life itself by tackling her own cancer with the same 'can do' attitude. She embraces the fears that come with any cancer diagnosis by turning the power of fear against its source. As we all joked when she was first diagnosed, "Cancer f***ed with the wrong person."

Read the rest of Julia Barry's blog at the Huffington Post.