Let's address the elephant I just inserted into the room

Be warned, I'm about to drop some seriously twisted irony on you...

When I was 19 I was back home for winter break, having just finished my first college semester. I was hanging out in my childhood bedroom one night when suddenly my neck started to itch. So I scratched it. As I finished relieving my discomfort, my hand brushed over a lump at the base of my neck, just above the collarbone. The same spot on the other side of my neck was smooth as a whistle.

Mindpower

What happened next is so flippin' ironic that I could die. I exploded downstairs to find my mother in the kitchen, gathered up all of the cheesiest, most obvious sarcasm I could muster, and blurted "Hey Ma! I think I have cancer! HAHAHA."

What a jackass.

Well, the joke was on me, wasn't it? About 4 weeks, several doctor appointments, and one lymph node biopsy later, I was diagnosed with Hodgkin's Lymphoma. I sat with my parents just long enough to process it all and level out my emotions. Then I left to go work my shift at my college pizza place job. Fun fact: the lump on my neck was about the diameter of a dime. Turns out that it was only the tip of the iceberg. The part of the tumor that wasn't visible on the surface was the size of a golf ball.

Of course I was experiencing a plethora of emotions, but for reasons completely unknown to me (and to this day I still have no clue), I wasn't scared. I acknowledged it and accepted it. My inner voice never asked "why me?" and I never felt sorry for myself. Throwing a pity party never helps? Instead, I instantly adopted the following mentality:

Cancer just got diagnosed with a terminal case of STEVE.

Then I kicked the shit out of it.

I didn't drop all my classes for the semester (full disclosure, I did drop one 1-credit class...). I didn't cut back my hours at work. I didn't even take the summer off from playing on a local amateur baseball club. Best of all, throughout chemotherapy I never lost my hair and never once got nauseous. Obviously I don't have scientific proof for this theory, but I'm 100% convinced that my fighter's mentality was the single greatest reason why I absolutely demolished it. I decided, in a single moment,

I was going to make cancer my bitch.

Seven months later I was a cancer survivor.

P.S. Note this is the super duper short version. The full story is significantly longer and would be way better suited for a long-form publication sometime down the road like, oh I don't know, a book of some sort? *wink*

P.P.S. I'll make publish a video telling a more detailed version if enough of you demand it from me. Email me at the link below!

Want to know more or ask me anything about this experience? Email me at steve@stevejtrudeau.com

The dark days

Life seemed pretty good for a about a year after cancer treatment. I has happy to be alive. I landed myself a girlfriend, had fun with my core group of friends, and got to enjoy the college experience a little bit. I was pretty happy. The only problem was I had gone from focusing on being a fighter and doing all I could to maintain my killer mentality, straight into lending all of my efforts to living a "normal" life again. I didn't give myself the time to learn how to cope with everything I'd been through and I never stopped to consider the resounding psychological impact it would have on me.

My mental health was incredibly fragile. And I was utterly oblivious to it.

Roughly a year after being declared a survivor, one of my dearest, closest friends was in a head-on collision with a delivery truck. A week later I buried one of the most genuine and selfless people I've ever known.

Four months later my girlfriend cheated on me and we broke up. At the time our relationship had been stronger than ever and I had grown a deep appreciation and love for her. Needless to say, I was completely blindsided,

With my mental and psychological health so weak already, those two events pushed me to my breaking point and I instantly plunged into a complete crisis of identity and purpose that would last for over six years. For six years I dragged along the very bottom of humanity. But just as I began questioning if I was destined to live out my life as a mere shadow of a person, something remarkable happened.

The catalyst

One day I became frighteningly aware that I'd somehow lost all of my social skills. I had been so deep into my demoralizing soul searching journey for so long, I completely forgot how to simply talk to people. That's when it hit me that I'd fallen so far that if I didn't do something very soon, all hope for me would lost forever. I did some brief research and a few minutes later was ordering a copy of some book I'd never heard of before. My last-ditch effort to prevent myself from becoming broken beyond repair. Two days later I was completely submerged into How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie.

Taking back control

Obviously, Carnegie's brilliant and timeless novel isn't a spiritual, save-my-life kind of book. So you might be wondering how the hell it could possibly pull me out of the darkness. 

It's simple. Almost instantly, I found myself improving drastically in social situations. That book made me witness first-hand that if there was some part of my life or myself that I didn't like, I had the power to do something about it. That was the day that I discovered the vast and beautiful world of personal development. And from that moment forward, I was hooked.