In 2016, Tara Peterson was planning some big changes for her life — she had left her teaching career of 22 years to spend the summer with her kids, and planned to seek a new career in the nonprofit sector that fall.

But then, everything changed in a way she didn’t expect. She found a lump in her breast and in September she received a diagnosis of a fast-growing triple negative breast cancer. 

Shuttling between her home in Florida and MD Anderson Cancer Center in Texas, Tara underwent treatment, including a double mastectomy and chemotherapy.

“That’s kind of the clinical side of my cancer story. But, the other side is the emotional side,” Tara said. “I was always a person who had everything planned—your typical Type A, detailed person—and this completely upset my apple cart, sending the apples flying everywhere.”

Tara’s husband, Travis, provided the emotional support necessary to help get her from one appointment to another. But the cancer diagnosis had added an extra weight on other unresolved issues from earlier in her life.

“I felt like I lived in just a dark cave and I had a mental picture in my head of the sunlight outside,” Tara recalled. “But I couldn’t feel it or experience it.”

Then, an acquaintance reached out and told Tara about A Fresh Chapter.

“She told me I should apply, about how it was a life-changing journey,” said Tara, who was resistant at first. But finally she filled out the application for an Odyssey experience the day before it was due. “And then next thing you know, I was in Peru.”

Tara and other participants volunteered with senior citizens in the town of Villa El Salvador outside of Lima in 2019. The volunteer experience and the connection with peers—people who were also dealing with the aftermath of cancer—allowed her to see that joy was possible in challenging circumstances. Tara learned to use tools like holding space to really listen and to hear about others’ experiences, a tool she shared with her husband upon returning home.

“The Peru experience not only helped teach me how to deal with the aftermath of cancer, but it kind of dredged up all those old issues I was carrying around all those years,” Tara said. After Tara returned home, she sought therapy for depression and eventually found her way out of the cave.

“I’m living on the roof of that cave and the hole’s still there,” she said. “Every once in a while I look down in it, but I don’t stick my head in there anymore. I’m not dangling my legs in there.”

Tara decided that A Fresh Chapter was kind of like chocolate: “If a little bit is good, a lot must be better,” she said. So she applied for the 10-week Ignite Experience program.

“In Peru, I learned that it is possible for people to live in uncertain circumstances and still feel joy, but it wasn’t until after Ignite that I learned to do it for myself,” she said.

With Ignite, Tara said revisiting some of the tools she learned during the Odyssey experience helped her remember that “I can look at possibilities. It reminded me to get curious when I started to worry or when I had a problem. What’s at the root of this here? What is the worst thing that could happen? And if that happens well, here’s what I’ll do.”

At the same time, it helped her to look at the other side of “what if” and instead say, “Okay, but wouldn’t it be cool if…?” she said.

Tara also learned to accept conflicting emotions — often heightened during challenging times like a cancer diagnosis. “I learned that I can feel angry and sad at the same time that I felt gratitude,” Tara said. “I thought that it was an either/or. The existence of one doesn’t mean that there’s not an existence of the other.”

Each program offered a deep value and “opens up your mind to possibilities that you don’t know exist, that you can’t fathom at the time,” Tara said. “The aftermath of cancer seems to be for so many, just an uncertain place to be. Especially for those of us that pushed an apple cart. Now, I just walk among all the apples that are strewn everywhere, and it’s fine. A Fresh Chapter helps you find possibility in the midst of uncertainty.”

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Nikki Kallio is a writer and cancer survivor. She has worked for newspapers in Wisconsin, Maine and California, and is now a freelance writer and editor. Nikki is a graduate of the Goddard College MFA creative writing program, and her fiction has appeared in literary journals including Minerva Rising and Midwestern Gothic. Her essay “Cold Front,” about the anxiety of cancer recovery amid the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, appears in the 2021 anthology “(Her)oics: Women’s Lived Experiences During the Coronavirus Pandemic” from Pact Press.

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