Thriving Past Cancer: Marine's Journey

Watching the opening ceremony of the 2018 Olympic s, some truths struck me: Unity and Community is all any of us can contribute to our existence and in so doing make this life a better place. What do I mean by that? I’m so glad that you too had that question. If you haven’t met me yet, I’m pretty intense. One random thought can consume me until I unknot it. So here I am, on a Sunday morning at 5 a.m., unknotting truth. I realized when watching the ceremony that my entire life has been lived in Hollywood, CA doing just this, seeking truth in unity and community. My first vivid experience arose during the first ten years of my life, living on the streets with my fellow brethren, my best friend (we’ll call him T) and I brought together all the children of the community to our apartment building. There was an empty corner that shielded us from the weather. We set up a makeshift classroom there. We sat them down and spent endless hours with them. I taught them and helped them...

I have a vivid memory of walking through Barnes and Noble almost twenty years ago, arm in arm with one of my dearest friends. (Let's call her SBN for short) "What would your heaven look like?" She asked then. I grinned and replied,"This book store, the scent, reading endlessly, and living each character's adventure with them." This memory came to mind on Tuesday as this same friend and I found ourselves in Barnes and Noble, no less. We went from book to book, flipping it open to random pages and finding passages that spoke to our hearts. She found a poem about a Cancer-Warrior and exclaimed, "Look, this is you!"  We spoke of life and death, Billy Joel and Tom Potty, our children, and God. A few times we had to pause and breathe as tears filled our eyes. We must have been quite a sight. We shared numerous embraces yesterday, grateful to be alive. I filled her in on my progress as I look ahead to returning to work next week supposedly a ...

I've been told to remain in the "present moment," that thoughts of the past will only add sorrow and confusion. However, I can't help but wonder why then do we have the past and future to contend with. If Scrooge learned from his past and future, maybe Charles Dickens was onto something.  Thus, I decided that to strengthen one's resolve one must allow themselves to explore memories from the past. It's unavoidable and necessary. Although it's important to live in the present, I've come to realize that we can't completely ignore the past, but instead we must learn from it. This week, I found myself doing just this. As the school year approaches, my inadvertent return nears, and summer comes to an end, I can't help but wonder whether I will be able to hack it. I know for a fact that I'm a bit slower physically, but my greatest fear is that I'm a bit slower in thought too, thus I may let others down.  So, the memory I'd like to...

By: Marine Yanikian-Sutton I was a freshman at USC double majoring in Psychology and English. The Psych professor stood before a hundred of us and held up a rubber band. "What does this represent?" he asked. Silence filled the room. He answered his own rhetorical question. "This is a representation of relationships. Once formed, they need to be flexible. They need to be able to stretch, change, expand, and retract." "What do you mean? If you overstretch it, it will snap," another freshman said. The professor held up a stick and continued, "Exactly. If your relationship can't change over time, if you can't walk down different paths and reconnect when needed, if it is as inflexible as a stick, it will break. That being the case, if you overstretch it, it will snap," with that he snapped the twig which could be heard as far back as the last row. When I met Ryan December of my freshman year I held on to what I had heard  about ...