Well, Aren't You Just a 'Regular Decorated Emergency'?

🦋 “DAYLYN : like; Daylight” | “Hey there, Sunshine!” 🌞

Butterflies are such interesting organisms that often symbolize life and death… An entirely different being dissolved into goo for months… just to become something new. Because of that, they’re often tied to fate… and to mortality.

Around September last year, a butterfly-shaped hole appeared on the surface of the sun
And that same week…. My butterfly got scheduled to be removed.

But let me back up a lil—

In June 2025, I was diagnosed with papillary thyroid cancer.

A butterfly-shaped gland in my throat had cells that metastasized into 6 nodules throughout the area. They were positive for a genetic mutation that causes the most common cancer in the US, PTC. It had been growing for 8 years (at least). The largest tumor was pressing on my carotid artery and pressing on many nerves. Though it is the most survivable cancer it was at a point it had to come out sooner rather than later.

They said “it’s the cancer you want to have.”

But let’s be real, nobody wants this, Andrea!

They’ll give you a list of causes

☢️Radiation
❤️‍🩹Damaged Cells
🏜️Environmental exposure

And yet, sometimes, the body is not separate from what it carries.
Sometimes it’s internal integration. Things the body learns to hold just to keep moving, not as a single cause, but as part of the terrain. Everything else grows within

Everything after that… wasn’t loud…
It wasn’t broadcast
It was quiet,
Heavy,
Internal,
Unraveling.

But life didn’t pause.
It kept moving… Somedays it still feels like a battle happening in the void of space. Like getting hit by meteors mid fight

In November I had my surgery. The largest of the nodules had been applying a lot of pressure to my nerves and carotid artery for years. Things were literally more clear.

And somewhere between before and after…
I just wasn’t the same

I don’t mean weaker
I don’t mean broken

Just… no longer available in the same ways

The past 18 months have forced me to face mortality in ways I never prepared for. Many ways that are to be a post entirely of their own. This was enough trauma for one day.

Next month I have my RAI treatment
Then sometime after that I can finally get a full body scan…
All of it sounds like a process to activate super powers if you ask me
So here’s hopin’

People keep talking about having thicker skin... Like I’m supposed to be built to absorb more... To let everything pass through me without consequence...

But I was never the Silver Surfer
If anything…
I’m more of the Invisible Girl

Holding everything
Carrying more than I should have
Letting things in that didn’t belong to me

Everything changed.

I’m not here to absorb everything anymore
Like the Invisible Woman
I decide what gets through
What gets held
What gets stopped at the surface

I didn't become this soft on my own
People loved it into me before they left this plane
And now it's mine to carry — the way you carry something sacred — and never, ever put it down.
There's more to say about that but grief deserves its own page.

If any of this landed somewhere in your body — there's a place to put it.

I spent the last few months refining The Blunt Body Check-In — a no-BS reflection journal for anyone with a body and a truth to tell. Not therapy. Not wellness. A mirror. A reckoning. A heat check. $9

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Still soft,

Ms. Stronger Boundaries