Читать книгу Chasing Worthiness - Tammy Sherger - Страница 18

If you are feeling the signs of an empty worthiness tank and this narrative resonates with you, I need you to know something. You don’t need to live that way. You deserve to live the life you are most passionate about.

I want to share with you how three little words changed my life. They came in response to a question I asked my doctor. I was thirty-six years old, diagnosed with stage two breast cancer.

“Am I going to die?” I asked. He spoke words that have become my reset button.

“I don’t know,” he said. I don’t know. In that moment, in that doctor’s office, I took those three little words as a revelation. I realized I had run out of hope. I had run out of time. I was filled with an overwhelming sense of regret. Regret for the things I hadn’t said. That I hadn’t done. But mostly for all the things I would never have a chance to become.

I must tell you; I can still feel being in that room, in that moment of despair. Oh my God, how can it be over? What do you mean I’m going to die? I don’t have any more time left? I hadn’t written all I wanted to write. I hadn’t traveled or danced. I hadn’t done any of the things I’d whispered quietly to myself. I hadn’t done any of that because of my belief that I didn’t follow the right path. That success was not for me. That I wasn’t good enough. I was not worthy.

That was the day death became a close reality for me instead of a distant event that would take place far off in my future. None of us considers our mortality until we are faced with a life-threatening situation. However, you don’t need to wait for that; you can learn from my lessons. I made a promise to myself that day that if I lived, I would never face that feeling of regret again.

That one moment took me on an extraordinary journey travelling from deep despair and overwhelming regret to being able to follow my true passion and live my life beyond what I had ever dreamed possible for myself as a young girl.

That moment of regret started a twenty-year journey for me. I’ve been twenty years cancer free now. My journey started with a commitment to myself, that day, to live without regret. What I didn’t know was that it would also lead me to discover how worthiness was the missing ingredient to living my dreams.

No matter what I had to do, I was going to make sure that whenever my final moment came, I would know without a doubt that I had lived unapologetically and completely. I hoped that I had more time to redeem. I didn’t know when the final moments would be. I was going to find out if I was going to live after a process of treatment and recovery. I still had a mountain of medical treatment to go through. If you are unaware of cancer treatment, there is an excruciatingly long period between a diagnosis and the moment when somebody says you have hope. Another biopsy remained before they would provide me with any information other than malignancy. That test returned. I had a lumpectomy and submitted myself to treatment.

It was after surgery that I finally heard there was hope. The cancer hadn’t spread to my lymph nodes. That time between diagnosis and surgery gave me too much space to sit in regret. My promise wasn’t just about staving off regret. It was about living each day to its fullest.