I chose to view my year as a ‘project’ rather than a terrifying diagnosis

By guest blogger Carla Faira

Carla Faria is a creative strategist and content marketing expert, who is also qualifying to be a personal and business coach. She lives in Surrey with her husband and two children. Last April, at the beginning of the first lockdown, she was diagnosed with breast cancer and began a journey that involved surgery, chemotherapy and a lot of uncertainty. When we talked to Carla about her experience and about how she had navigated a very tough year, the recurring theme of our conversation was resilience.

I’d always thought that resilience was something some people had, and others just didn’t. You hear about sportspeople refusing to let a tough season get to them, or a writer getting knock-back after knock-back from publishers, but never for a minute considering giving up. I’d always wondered where those people found their strength. Were they born with it or had they developed it? I didn’t consider that I could be one of those people, until I was faced with a setback of my own. Last April, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. Immediately, I was faced with tests, scans, surgeries and chemotherapy. I knew that I was facing permanent changes in the way my body looked and felt and treatment so brutal that my hair, eyebrows and eyelashes would fall out and there would be days when I would feel too sick to have a conversation, let alone eat a meal.

Somehow, curiously, I got through it. And I didn’t just get through it, I got through it with a smile, with some humour and with a real faith in my body’s ability to heal. I remember thinking, as I was dealing with the rigours of hospital visits and endless tests and treatments… I think this might be resilience.

Resilience isn’t what I’d once thought it was. It isn’t the wearing of invisible armour, nor is it a refusal to fail. It’s the ability to bounce back after setbacks. I found myself miraculously able to get up most mornings and have breakfast with my children, chat to friends over Zoom, do a little exercise most days and even cook meals from time to time. More importantly, I found myself striding into chemo sessions with purpose and a sense of positivity. I’d discovered that resilience, for me, didn’t mean trying to achieve the impossible, but instead, knowing that setbacks are part of life and that I could decide how I chose to look at them. I chose to view what I was facing as something amazing and lifesaving. I suppose I chose to be grateful.

How have personal relationships played into your ability to be resilient?

They have played a huge part and, if I’m honest my relationships have tested me as much as they’ve been a source of strength. My younger sister was diagnosed with breast cancer when she was 29. She went through the hell of surgery, chemotherapy and radiotherapy only for it to recur a few years later. She went through still more surgery and chemo. She finally lost her battle with it 9 years after her original diagnosis. To lose someone you love so much to a disease that you then find out you have 10 years later is hard to handle. I’ve found that I’ve re-lived a lot of my grief for my sister during my own treatment. I’ve also had to work incredibly hard to remind myself that my situation is very different. In that instance, resilience is about allowing yourself a moment or two to feel down or afraid, but then reminding yourself that there are many more reasons to feel grateful. 

I think that great relationships just aid your ability to be resilient. When you know which people in your life give you strength, you can lean into those relationships, especially when times are tough. You have to know who your cheerleaders are and allow those people to ‘feed’ you so to speak. My family and close friends were incredible. When I was going through treatment, they got the balance absolutely spot-on between being nurturing and being practical. They didn’t act as though I needed to be tiptoed around; they were just themselves. They were there when I felt like talking and didn’t push hard when I didn’t.

What inspires you to keep at your goals?

I’m a real believer in the idea that a goal is actually made up of lots of smaller goals – little achievements that you can celebrate along the way. For me, thinking of goals as a journey and not an end result encourages a sort of growth mentality; the idea that you might need to hop onto a different path or have a rethink but that this doesn’t constitute failure; just a little bend in the road. This has always helped me in my professional life but I found that it also helped me when I was looking at my cancer treatment. Celebrating small wins proved to be hugely important part of my recovery.

How does contribution and giving back play into your career and life?

My relationship with my career is interesting! I’ve always been a high-achiever and have probably put a disproportionate amount of time and energy into my work. I’ve always been the main earner in my family too, so when I had to stop working to have my cancer treatment, I had to re-evaluate many things. Of course, the pressure it put on us financially was one thing - we had to rethink everything from how we structured our mortgage payments to how often we had takeaways - but for the first time, possibly ever, I had the time to think about what really mattered to me when it came to work. A few years ago, I stumbled across the Japanese concept of Ikigai, which I believe roughly translates as ‘reason for being’. The idea is that life can be fulfilling if there is balance between passion, mission, vocation and profession. Explained more simply, if you can find balance between what you love, what you’re good at, what the world needs and what you can be paid for, there is better balance in life as a whole. I realised that things had been out of kilter for a while and that working at 100 miles an hour meant that I just hadn’t stopped to give how I was feeling any thought. I was doing something I was good at and was being paid for it, and while I quite liked it, I didn’t love it and I certainly wasn’t giving back to the world. I wanted to make changes. I started to involve elements of coaching in my work and to consider how I could make coaching a bigger part of my work as a whole. 

What does success mean to you?

To me, success means contentment with my life; feeling healthy, happy and at peace with myself and with family and friends. I do think that success no longer has that very singular meaning that it once had, where the connotations were only ever about money and material things. For sure, success still has that meaning for some, but I think we have really diverse interpretations of what success means now. 

What do you wish you could tell your younger self?

The single biggest thing that I try to teach my daughters – and that I wish I’d learned sooner – is that it’s OK to fail. Failure is not a bad thing; quite the opposite in fact. It’s the chance to look at something objectively and think: OK, could I have done anything differently? If the answer is ‘yes’, then you’re ready for the next time. If the answer is ‘no’ then at least you can walk away knowing that you did your best.

If you could leave just one legacy or lesson behind, what would it be?

One of the things that this year has taught me and that I feel is such a great lesson, is that challenges will come and go throughout life, but regardless of how tough those challenges are, we have it in our power to choose how we feel about them. I chose to view my year as a ‘project’ rather than a terrifying diagnosis. It meant that I could look at my treatment as a stage in that project and tick the weeks off as they went by. It allowed me to celebrate the little wins along the way and to allow myself a bad day here and there, because, after all, all projects have them. Most of all, it meant that I could remind myself that this was just one of a number of projects I was working on and therefore didn’t need all of my energy. It made me more resilient than I had ever realised I could be.