There’s a moment nobody warns you about.
It’s not the diagnosis. It’s not the hardest day of treatment. It’s not the first time you look in the mirror after and don’t recognize yourself.
The moment nobody warns you about is the one where things start to actually work again — and you realize you’ve outgrown the ceiling you built while you were just trying to survive.
That’s where I’ve been sitting this week.
I have what I now call a flywheel. The work fuels the body. The body fuels the relationship. The relationship fuels the work. Around and around. Not because I planned it perfectly — but because I was deliberate about building each piece, one at a time, for long enough that they started feeding each other.
During cancer, I didn’t have a flywheel. I had a day. Then another day. You don’t think in systems when you’re just trying to make it to the next scan. You think in hours. You think in whether you can eat today, whether the nausea is manageable, whether you have enough left in the tank to be present with the people who love you.
That’s not weakness. That’s triage. That’s what surviving actually looks like — not inspiring, not cinematic. Just one day into the next.
But here’s the thing they don’t tell you about surviving: the skills you build in triage mode — the ones where you strip everything down to what actually matters — those are the exact skills that build a flywheel later.
Because you learn fast what the real infrastructure is. Job. Body. Relationship. The dog. Sleep. That’s it. Everything else is noise.
I named those things when everything was stripped away. I kept them. I tended to them even when I didn’t feel like it. And somewhere along the way — not dramatically, not in a single moment — they started compounding.
This week I led my USTA tennis team into sectionals as captain. I’m captaining the lineup. Choosing who plays with who. That’s not just tennis — that’s evidence. Evidence that the body works. That the mind is clear. That I trust myself to lead.
Eight years ago I wasn’t sure I’d play again.
The real question I’m sitting with now isn’t whether the flywheel is spinning. It’s what happens next. A flywheel generates energy — but at some point, that energy needs a transmission. Something bigger to route it toward. The next arc. The thing that wasn’t even visible when you were just trying to stay alive.
I don’t have the full answer yet. But I know what it means that I’m asking the question.
It means I made it to the other side.
If you’re still in triage — still in the hours, not the systems — that’s okay. Keep building the infrastructure. Name the things that actually matter and tend to them even when it hurts. The flywheel comes later. The transmission comes after that.
For now? Just stay in it.
Just. Keep. Moving.