After I got my diagnosis on Valentine’s Day, I knew deep in my heart it was my higher power. But I didn’t understand the full extent of it until my husband took off his ring, got drunk, stayed drunk, and disappeared for most of my chemo. This sounds way worse than it actually was. He’s an incredibly loving, dreamy, extremely faithful and exceedingly irresponsible being. He was even more dumbfounded than I was that things happened that way.

It was my HP (higher power) sending out a riptide of majikfire energy, clearing my life of everything I once had been for a radius of about 10,000 eons. There was no way my husband could withstand her will, nor could I.

It was then that I got my first true glimpse (in this life, although I’m sure in previous existences I have realized this again and again) of how fierce and unstoppable her power is, once she switches gears and initiates her next desire. Nothing can resist her, and nothing compares to her.

There’s no bargaining. There’s no nonsense. There’s no holding on.

There’s only letting go.

So I took my ring off, too. I worked it over my knuckle, unbelievingly. I had not taken it off for seven years. A sweeping sadness, the sorrow of sudden endings that you had not thought would ever happen, swept through me.

I had thought I would be married for the rest of my life. I guess most people do.

But the bittersweet feeling vanished as quickly as it had come. And then the most astounding thing happened, which I had not expected at all, and could never have known was laying latent within me.

I got shivers through and through of a sort of radiant awe. This passionately liberated exhilaration pounded through my veins. I went back to my magicamp. Looked out my window, my heart free and galloping. This huge mystic wonderstruck feeling was singing through my mind.

I had come home.

I’m not talking about my physical home. I’m talking about who I really am. As much as I am a lover, there is an even bigger part of me that is a nun, or a monk. I felt this truth acutely, as certainly and indisputably as I have ever felt anything.

So I began my celibacy again. I have returned to being a nun in a laughter-filled, creative, women-filled world. And for the next ten years, I will devote every energy of my heart and mind to my spiritual path and to writing the next six volumes of Madwoman on a Rainbow.

I’m aware, as I state that so boldly, that some could feel skeptical of such sweeping dreams. I get it—I’m a drunk in recovery: I can’t get arrogant about anything. Everything is a day at a time.

But I’m also a Capricorn. When I say I’m gonna do something, I go to any lengths to accomplish it, no matter how hard it is, no matter how long it takes. Step-by-step up the mountain.

I didn’t mean to boast. All of that was simply to say:

For some women, it takes cancer to get you to look at what you really want, and who you really are!