Nerissa Balland on Creativity, Resilience, and Canvas of Courage

[00:00:03] Hi, I'm Dr. Russell Thackeray and welcome to Resilience Unravelled, a podcast with new ideas, new thoughts, and new thinking about resilience. Guests with remarkable stories, products and services that can really power up your own mindset and resilience. You can also go to our site for more information, to ask questions, or to access some of our resources at resilienceunravelled.com. Let's get started.

[00:00:32] Hello all and welcome back to Resilience Unravelled. And it's the middle of a heatwave here in sunny Blighty and it's absolutely scorcio. And I'm sitting opposite someone who looks cool, calm, collected, and very envious. My guest today is Nerissa Balland and it's lovely to see you. Nerissa, how are you? I'm doing great, Russell. Thank you for asking. Very good. And I can tell by the accent that you're not from these fair shores. So where in the world are you?

[00:01:01] I am located in Fort Lauderdale, Florida in the United States. Very good. It's a place I know, as we say, there you go. It's one of those places that most people who have ever been on a cruise ship absolutely know, in and out. Most of us have just ever been there for one night though. That's the challenge so many times. Look, Nerissa, thank you for joining me today. And why don't you just tell us a little bit about yourself? Nerissa Balland Let's see for anyone that can resonate out there. I'm a mother.

[00:01:27] I am a two-time cancer survivor. I'm an artist and I've been in the arts my whole life. And I'm also a big fan of what we say in the United States, soccer, but European or the rest of the world, football. And I've heavily been watching the World Cup the last several days. We have a big soccer family and my two boys play soccer internationally. So it's exciting.

[00:01:54] Nerissa Balland Yeah, they've been going to Spain and being in tournaments there over the last two years. They play what we call here in the States travel soccer, although we do travel outside of the United States for tournaments. So it's been a really exciting time of year for us. You've got absolute street credibility now with everybody in the UK that you like football and you called it football. Props. Nerissa, tell me a bit about what it is that you do.

[00:02:20] Nerissa Ballard I am a visual artist, a therapeutic arts practitioner. I'm an author and a facilitator working really at the intersection of creativity, resilience and personal growth. And my work really began from a very personal place. While navigating metastatic melanoma as a young mother and a full-time professional,

[00:02:45] I was really searching for other women that look like me, trying to parent and to work and maintain some sense of normalcy while living with cancer. And that was starting out in 2016 when I was diagnosed. And then four years later, in 2020, I started to interview young mothers that were facing cancer. With the hopes that maybe I might write a book, but I wasn't a writer.

[00:03:14] I'm a visual artist. But I was fascinated by the stories I was finding from women online. And we had the time during the pandemic to be able to do worldwide interviews with people on Zoom. And so after speaking with, let's say, more than 100 women from different countries and backgrounds and different diagnosis and support systems,

[00:03:38] what surprised me wasn't how different their circumstances were, but how similar many of their struggles were. And these women seemed to navigate adversity most effectively. They weren't the healthiest ones. They weren't the ones with the best prognosis, but they were the ones that were actively engaging in the work of processing their experiences

[00:04:01] and then finding gratitude in everyday moments and often using some form of creativity to help make sense of what they were going through. And those conversations ultimately led me to explore creativity, not simply as self-expression, but as a practical tool for processing emotions, rebuilding identity, and helping people move forward when life doesn't really go according to plan.

[00:04:32] You have given me tons to go up there. So I just made 14 different points of things to chance about. Let's see where we start, shall we? I think, first of all, if you just clear up the term visual artist, just so for people that am quite clear what that means. Yeah, sure. Because there's plenty of types of artists, right? So visual artists typically tend to have something tangible that you can see. And unlike a musician who is an artist and you're using your auditory capabilities to listen to the music

[00:05:02] and maybe feel it kinesthetically somehow in your body, visual arts is doing something. So I do murals. I do residential and corporate art that hangs on wall. And sometimes I do public art out in public spaces. Yeah. So it's interesting when you talk about the arts because you may or may not know that I'm from world of the arts myself. And I always maintain... It's interesting you're talking about creativity. I always maintain that anyone in the arts has that level of creativity, that particular form of creativity.

[00:05:30] But they also tend to know themselves better. So they have often a sense of self-esteem, self-worth, self-recognition, which is built on their body of work rather than the praise or approbation they get from others. And I wonder whether that can actually help people's resilience. I wonder what your views were. I think what's interesting is I guess first I'd want to define resilience a little bit more for me.

[00:06:00] And often I think that people think of resilience as bouncing back from something, right? I know I always did. But I see it a little differently now. And I see it where resilience is really the ability to engage with whatever adversity you're dealing with and then continuing to move forward. So it's not necessarily just about, oh, I bounced back. It's not pretending everything is okay.

[00:06:27] We spend years looking for an explanation on things. And I find that the resilience aspect isn't the bouncing back. It's really more about the process in moving forward. No, I like that. We talk about bouncing forward rather than bouncing back, which is one of those things. But also that point about weathering the storm is really interesting. Because as a musician, if I was not in the mood, I have to turn up and perform.

[00:06:53] If I was not sleepy, I had a child and had not only had any sleep for three hours of the day or whatever it was, I have to turn up and perform. If you were slightly under the weather, inebriated or whatever, you have to turn up and perform. There was that thing about being able to actually grit your teeth and just get over yourself and get on with it, as we used to say in psychology. And I think that sort of thing. But also there was that thing about making conscious choices about how we were in or how we are in the world, how we are as people.

[00:07:22] I think that's where I'm coming from because that sort of accountability we have from being able to recognise the upsides and downsides of our own performance or outputs. I don't think a lot of people deal with because they're used to being praised or criticised by someone else. Whereas we as artists, I'm going to put myself loose in that bracket now, we're much more aware of what we're producing. Not because of the reaction of others, but that satisfaction that we've created of the thing that we've actually done for ourselves.

[00:07:52] Yeah, so it's actually interesting. When I'm talking about creativity, I'm coming from a different place, not as an artist when I use that term. So I'll define that in a second. But what I think is pivotal to what you're talking about here for me, interestingly enough, as a professionally trained artist, creativity wasn't immediately helpful for me, actually. It was the antithesis. In fact, I had to unlearn a lot.

[00:08:18] I was so focused at first on technique and outcome and whether something looked good or it fit the script for a series of work I was working on. But what actually helped me re-educate myself in the creative space for therapeutic purposes was I began to participate in facilitated creative experiences where I didn't know what the outcome would be.

[00:08:47] I didn't actually plan the outcome or I didn't develop the plans for a class. I wasn't expected to perform as an artist. And I think the expectation of performing is something you were alluding to before. And that's a different type of space. And allowing myself to participate in creative exercises that were therapeutic, it started to allow me to pay attention and focus on a process rather than the product.

[00:09:16] And what I eventually discovered was that creativity wasn't helping me process cancer. It was helping me process myself. And then it just happened to beautifully unfold together because it was a time that I needed it. Yeah. For creativity that I talk about or a lot of times, and I know I'm not sure if your listeners are aware, so I should probably define when I said therapeutic arts practitioner.

[00:09:43] Therapeutic arts and arts and health use creative expression to support reflection, emotional processing, coping, well-being, meaning-making a lot. They don't require a diagnosis or a clinical treatment plan. And it is used still in healthcare systems, educational areas, community, wellness settings.

[00:10:07] And so that's where my work primarily sits when I'm not having my professional artist hat on. Yeah. So people often confuse art therapy and therapeutic art. They're very different because art therapy is a licensed mental health professionals that deliver credentials, art therapists in clinical treatment settings. So at therapy, it's more about expression. Yes. And I'll even go further.

[00:10:35] Aside from expression, because the arts in general, a lot of people, there's plenty of arguments and can have a whole podcast on self-expression and it's subjective. This isn't about self-expression. This is about honest expression that comes out during this type of process making. Now, that's very interesting. Are you implying that many of us express ourselves dishonestly?

[00:10:59] I'm implying that we might not be aware of how we are expressing ourselves. Okay. So I think while self-expression can still be in an honest way, it doesn't necessarily mean that you've done the work to truly understand what you're expressing. And is that linked to what you talked about in terms of identity or is that? I want to get to the cancer thing later if you don't mind, but you did actually mention identity.

[00:11:25] And I just wondered if that expression and identity are linked together in some way, shape or form. Yes. So I guess what I'm saying without getting into the psychology so much, but to put a little bit of a bow on it is creativity helps bring something into awareness. And that's the process portion where you are bringing things to a conscious nature. Often we can express things that come from a subconscious place.

[00:11:54] And that's where I'm not saying it's not honest, but it is not worked on with the end goal of knowing I want this to be an honest expression. It could be a self-expression could come from something in the moment or the impact of something that immediately just happened and you're responding to it or you're communicating about it.

[00:12:14] But that also can change. The honest expression is more the foundation and the deep-rooted beliefs and things that we have internally that sometimes and often we're not really ready to talk about or we may not know about yet and we have to uncover it. So creativity helps bring something into awareness, but a lot of cognitive tools help us to decide what to do with that once we have the awareness. That makes a lot of sense. I like that. It's very neat.

[00:12:42] I know you worked in the corporate world and I wonder whether artistic mindset, that might be the wrong word for it and forgive me if it is, but I wonder whether artistic perspective gives you a different way of looking at the commercial world and the issues and challenges that you saw within it. So I think different things happened at different moments and different time periods of my life. My 20s were quite different than my 30s and then quite different than my 40s. I would be 49 this fall.

[00:13:12] Thank you. And I was in a different headspace, I think naturally like many of us, right? Experience life, things come out in different ways. In the corporate environment, I tended to work in quite toxic work environments. I'm not sure if I chose them or they chose me, but somehow there was a magnet. And there were certain parts of those environments that I almost just couldn't get away from.

[00:13:41] So the corporate world for me, even when I moved from corporate to nonprofit thinking I'd find a little more relief or some semblance of, wow, I'm making a difference in the world. I still found that same toxicity in nonprofit environment, in the workspace, in a traditional workspace.

[00:14:05] So for me, there was a lot of so that I could get through the days, so that I could get a different client, so that I could move up the ladder or move companies, go to a different company, get a promotion. And everything was really wrapped up in success. And when I say success, meaning success was defined to me through achievement, through positions, through titles, through what I was making. No other categories.

[00:14:33] And I found that to be quite empty. And when I turned around in my 30s saying, what am I doing? I'm working in advertising spaces. And I feel like I'm helping put people in credit card debt when I work for credit card companies. I feel like I'm selling soda to obese children. That's like, where's my legacy? That actually, those questions came about when I was diagnosed and saying, oh, my God, what am I going to do with the time that I have left? And how much time do I have?

[00:15:02] And what's the legacy that I'm leaving behind? So I began to really take a hard look at those environments, but also internally what was happening and what wasn't happening, really. So what do you think was at the root of those toxic cultures? That's a loaded question, but I like it. Here's the gun. Here's the gun, I know. Just don't fire it at your own feet. I don't know that I have an answer for that.

[00:15:29] I think that, in part, I don't want to blame the culture so much. I think I would like to take more accountability at taking a look at myself and how I showed up in those cultures. I think partly I can say that now because I spent my 20s and 30s blaming everyone else for everything, and I was a victim mode.

[00:15:52] So I think the question that is interesting as individuals, and then maybe if companies also had this flipping the script a little bit, is I began to say, oh, my God, why me? Why me? Why always me? But that's an unanswerable question. You cannot answer why me. We don't know that. Even people of great faith, and they turn to faith, and they will say, oh, God has put this here, and I will move forward.

[00:16:22] They're really not answering it. That's just where their faith lies, and that's in the definition of having faith in something. But I think that the real question is, what now? Right? So when something comes to you, whether it's in a professional space or a personal space, it's not a why me or why this client or why this. It's what now? What do we do now to move forward?

[00:16:44] I don't know that companies, and because they're not people, but they're environments, organizational behaviors, I think it's like a medley, like a soup. You're throwing all types of ingredients in with lots of different people coming from different personalities, perspectives, experiences, engagement. And when you do that, it's very difficult to – it happens everywhere, right? It happens in politics, companies, the whole world.

[00:17:12] When you start to make this alphabet soup, so to speak, or stew, it becomes very difficult to dilute and bring down and get to the core of things because we just keep toppling on top of each other. That's probably what I would say for now. Well, it's interesting because it's interesting the way you've characterized that. Because old Carl Jung used to talk about our shadow side, our shadow persona, our ability to – what you recognize in other people is your sort of – deficiency wasn't the word, but I can't think of a better one at the moment – or our issues with ourselves.

[00:17:42] And I often find people who look at things which are toxic haven't realized yet that sort of power of accountability and choice because that's actually the secret to everything, isn't it? It's getting back to the process, controlling the process within your own mind or whatever it might be is the thing that changes the culture which we're part of. Because we are part of it, aren't we? And we play our part in creating the toxicity. You mentioned there as well that idea of what it was – did you say why not or something along those lines?

[00:18:10] And then you talked about that when you went through the cancer thing. Was this one of the things you mentioned earlier when you were talking about the process of engaging with yourself and engaging with your illness and such like? Yeah. As human beings, it's quite natural and very universal no matter where you come from to want to take control, right? To have control over your environment, over your job, over your personal finances, whatever it may be.

[00:18:38] You want to control something. But we don't have control over everything. Many things we don't have control over. And that's relaxing, yeah? It can be depending on what it is you're searching for and also depending on the type of person you are. I've always been a very type A person and very much like control, a big planner. Even though I'm an artist, which is so funny because a lot of times people say, but you're such an artist.

[00:19:05] Artists are so flighty and out there and creative. And I'm still creative, but I do – I really like things in order. I like structure. I like to be on time. Probably why I did well in a corporate space as an artist. You get things done. Yeah, I really do. And I'm one of those people that makes checklists for my checklist just so I can check it off. Somehow that gives me a sense of satisfaction.

[00:19:30] I think I'm probably getting off of the point here of what you were asking. But I really do feel that control is something that we have to relinquish to some – we have to give ourself permission. And it starts with that. If you can give yourself permission to say, let's not focus on the things that I can't control. If you really are interested in controlling, what can I control, right?

[00:19:53] And that was a huge part when I was interviewing many women, being able to find commonalities that they had with control as a whole. What could they control? And I can give you like a couple examples if you'd like. So, you know, I had one woman in my book that used to hold dance parties in her living rooms. And the woman described holding these dance parties in her living room with her children during treatment.

[00:20:23] And from the outside, that sounds very simple, even very playful, right? But what struck me about it, it wasn't really about dancing. It was about connection and presence and reclaiming moments of joy during a period that felt dominated by fear. And that activity actually created a temporary interruption in her stress cycle. And it allowed her to move her body, connect with her children, and experience herself as more than a patient.

[00:20:50] It became a reminder that the illness wasn't the entire part of her identity. Back to resilience in some respect too. Sometimes resilience looks less like strength and more like creating moments of connection in the middle of uncertainty. Then there was like another woman, Jennifer. She took these mental photographs in the sky. One, she talked about that she knew her life was changing right at a certain point.

[00:21:16] And she started to mentally lay on the ground and mentally took photos of the sky so that she could remember the moment before everything she knew was going to change. And it was going to be defined by appointments and treatments and uncertainty. And what fascinated me was that she wasn't documenting her cancer. She was documenting life. And that practice really anchored her attention in the present moment.

[00:21:42] And instead of constantly projecting into an uncertain future that she didn't know about what was going to happen. Yeah, that's really interesting. I think we talk a lot. In fact, I did a podcast on this three or four dozen episodes ago about this concept of waiting well. And I think that's really beautiful what you described there because it is that thing, isn't it? When we're waiting, a whole sense of being out of control with the process. I'm guessing with cancer as well, why it's more rapid than some processes. It's pretty, it must be pretty scary.

[00:22:12] It's a real thing to say. Every minute must feel like a day when you sit waiting for your next appointment. It's a horrible thing. So without going into too much gory detail, but tell me a little bit about your illness and hopefully prognosis from here on in. I will start because people always hear cancer and they move back a bit or want to know. So just I'll start from the back. I am currently eight and a half years NED, which stands for no evidence detected.

[00:22:41] So that's great. And I do go this summer to hopefully get my nine years to be cleared from oncology. But since 2016, that's when I was first diagnosed. I was five and a half months pregnant at the time. And I had a 15 month old toddler at home and I was working full time. I got the call during a work day, many calls, calls and texts.

[00:23:06] And my doctor at the time who was a dermatologist, I had, which I just realized I hadn't shared really, but metastatic melanoma, which is a skin cancer. Yeah, I've had the same thing. Oh, you have? Okay. Yeah. It's not great. Not great. However, I was getting these calls. My dermatologist at the time is my son's godfather. And so he's a family friend. So hence why I say I was getting many messages and calls.

[00:23:34] Normally your doctors would not call you persistently over and over in the middle of the day. So my husband and my doctor, Dr. Schiffman, were calling me, which was very unusual. So when I finally got off a conference call and called my doctor back right away and he gave me the news and said that I needed to see an oncologist immediately.

[00:23:57] And I was, I'm still slightly embarrassed to admit that when I got that information, I was confused because to me, skin cancer felt like something you would scrape away and then you move on from. Not cancer like a breast or colon or something that felt like it was in the body and it was detrimental. I was like, but why do I need to see an oncologist?

[00:24:23] Can't we just, you know, again, just chop it off and we'll move on. And he's like, that's not actually how it works. So I was, it was very eye opening for me. And so as I moved forward into this space, a few pinnacle points that I will share because I think it's always good to bring awareness to people to take advocacy and their health into their own hands.

[00:24:50] So I went to a really well-renowned doctor who everyone raved about. I waited six hours. This was my first visit to an oncologist. I waited and within 48 hours of being told this news. And I went and waited six hours at Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center in Miami, which is a great place. And I saw him for 10 minutes. A couple of things stood out to me. One, when I was in the waiting room, no one looked like me.

[00:25:20] No one was pregnant and no one was in their 30s. That was, felt a little bit more, I felt ostracized in some way, like I wasn't in the right place. So when I went to see him, he very quickly dismissed me because I was pregnant and said he wouldn't treat me unless I terminated the pregnancy. What? Now, yeah. Now my children are IVF. So anyone that doesn't know what IVF is, but that is where you need the assistance of medical care to get pregnant.

[00:25:49] And that takes a lot of time, money and physical aspects that you have to put your body through to conceive and then deliver a child. And so I was beside myself going, no one told me I'm going to die tomorrow. Why do I need to terminate the child? I was thinking, I don't have brain cancer. And I felt hopeless when I went in there. I was so excited to see this doctor who's supposed to be so great.

[00:26:16] So my husband and I left and we found another medical team within a week that we really liked who didn't say that I needed to terminate, but we needed to go around some different ways that were not maybe a little bit more unorthodox or not as traditional. So we did that. And really what we had was a plan. And then I moved on while I was pregnant. I did have to have a surgery, a wide excision surgery with no general anesthesia. That was fun.

[00:26:44] Then I went on to have my child a few weeks early so that I could begin nuclear medicine and try to figure out where it traveled so that we could treat it with a more specific plan. And then I spent eight months on immunotherapies, still working full time, had both kids. And sometimes I would not be able to go home because I had so much radiation. And with small children, you can't be around. They can't be around you because you're admitting that.

[00:27:11] So I would go and stay in a hotel room until a 24-hour period passed and I was considered radiation free. And I did that for about eight months. And then the cancer had returned. And once it returned, it was interesting, it was during the hurricane season when we had to evacuate. And when we came back, I got the results from the doctor. And when I got those results, I actually got additional results that I was pregnant and I didn't know it. Again?

[00:27:41] Yeah, I was pregnant. And this would have been naturally, which blew my mind because all through IVF. That's often the case after IVF, isn't it? Yeah. And then my doctor was really giving me, really giving it to me saying, I told you, I told you. This is all, I hear this all the time from people with IVF. They randomly get pregnant right after. I had to terminate that pregnancy because the cancer had returned. I needed to do surgeries and start chemo.

[00:28:08] But how that actually unfolded was wild. I was planning to have that done with the next surgery, wrap it all up in one so I didn't have to experience a termination. But my gynecologist, my OBGYN's office, made me take a ultrasound. And when I took the ultrasound, it came back fine. So they said ethically they don't perform those types of procedures. And I was like beside myself. It was a Friday afternoon.

[00:28:38] And I was like, this isn't a standard. I'm not asking to just terminate any pregnancy. This is what the oncologist said I need to do. But that was their protocol. And I wish they had shared that with me prior. So I had that expectation that if they were looking for an ultrasound that was normal, that they wouldn't proceed. But they hadn't shared that with me. So I found myself on a Friday evening with my husband going to an abortion clinic quickly because my surgery was Monday.

[00:29:07] And as I was there being prepped, I then got a call from my oncologist saying, After you finish where you're at, you need to immediately go to the emergency room to have an MRI because we can see, we think that it's gone into your bones. And if it has, we will not be doing this surgery on Monday. We have to change the plan. So it was just a lot happening very fast.

[00:29:35] But luckily I had great support from my husband. He was an amazing advocate. He kept me offline from a lot of the scary things that are posted and kind of kept me in a bubble that way. But I went on that way. And then the chemo was not working well for me. I did about six weeks of it. And then I quit. And I just said, I need a break. My body needed a break. And so we went through the holidays in December. And then come January, we returned.

[00:30:03] And I also told my oncologist, again, this is advocating for yourself. My husband wanted me to go back into treatment, naturally, because he wanted me to live and be here. But I just said, I can't. You're telling me that there's an 11% chance that this treatment's going to help. And I'm just not there for that. There's just so many side effects of things I didn't want to do.

[00:30:26] So I took the position, which definitely needs a gentler term, especially coming from someone who was in marketing, of watch and wait, which is, ugh, I don't like that term. But I took watch and wait. And luckily, I'm blessed that I had not had it returned since then. Brilliant. And I think you've said something, really important things. One is advocating for yourself, which is absolutely right. The second is having the courage to walk away from supposed professionals who seem to know what they're talking about.

[00:30:56] And I think that's, it's one of the biggest challenges we face, don't we? That sort of white coat syndrome of believing that anybody who tells us anything because they're in a position of authority, right, rather than giving us information to help us make our own decisions. This is always about patient choice, isn't it? And I think we forget that. So I think that's absolutely amazing. Also, you mentioned something that, as well as the IVF thing, that I hear a lot, which is this idea that a lot of people don't realize the percentage of, of something curing you.

[00:31:26] But the massive risks of the side effects and such like, and there are many people who just elect not to go into treatments. We do brilliantly. And, and again, there's this sort of idea, I think in this country, we have what's called the cancer pathway. And it's almost like an escalator. Once you get on, you're sort of whooshed forward. And like, how, how do I get off this thing? If you, if you question that, there's this idea that, well, you're A, you're not being very grateful. And B, how would you know? Because you're not an expert. But we are experts in our own bodies, aren't we? Yeah, I do.

[00:31:55] And I think that also comes to being able to listen to yourself. So, which is also, I say that, that's easier said than done too, right? Because we can tell ourselves all day long things that aren't necessarily true, right? But that's the script. That's the narrative that we run in our mind. And we do hear that. So I do think often that's why a lot of my work is interdisciplinary. I don't, even though I use creativity as a tool, I use it with other tools too.

[00:32:24] I'm very into NLP, which is neuro-linguistic programming for those people that don't know what that acronym is. And that's just a fancy word for brain language, how we see, hear, and feel the world that we're in. Not a feeling like an emotion, but kinesthetically. And when you can start to get in touch with understanding that, then you can understand if you're trying to write the script in your mind, that narrative that is actual, factual,

[00:32:52] actual, or is it something that's just making you feel better in the moment or feeling worse? Yeah. Let's talk about this. I know you've written a book and we should definitely talk about this. So tell me a little bit about it. First of all, tell me what it is and who's it for? So it's not coming from a clinical space. It's coming more from a story. So anyone out there that is potentially, I'll make a, before I dive into it, make a little bit of analogy.

[00:33:21] I've been told and I can see the resemblance is that it's very similar to a chicken soup for the soul. So they are, it's a combination, it's 19 individual stories of young mothers. When I say young, I define that between the ages of 20 and 40 years old when they're mothering, meaning they're pregnant or they have young children at home. And this is not in any way to take away from mothers who have cancer, but are older and

[00:33:49] outside of that range because they could have children or grandchildren, but they're at a very different chapter of their life. So I was interested in focusing on the women that were pregnant or had very little ones at home, meaning they were still a caregiver before they were a parent and they are needing a caregiver in that moment. So young mothers facing cancer. And in that, in that space I was looking for, when I interviewed many women, I was looking for a commonality.

[00:34:18] And the commonality was that I found a few things that these women weren't broken. They were unprocessed and they found creative outlets that were helping them through their diagnosis, through their illness, and ultimately allowing themselves and gave themselves permission to use creativity to start to become aware of what they could control and what they couldn't

[00:34:46] to help their mindset become more positive. Because I felt that in this space, what I could see along the whole time is a toxic positivity. Yeah. And that really bothered me. It really, it really bothered me. It was no one's fault necessarily that I was blaming. But when you have an illness like that and people who love you or support you or around you, it's natural for them to say, think positive and be positive.

[00:35:13] But if you don't have the tools to do that, how do you know how to truly have that? And so I found that all of these women really, really internalized gratitude in everyday small moments of joy that were allowed to give them some semblance. So these stories are not actually just for other cancer patients, but they can be from anybody that is a caregiver or grieving or want to understand what somebody might be going through in this

[00:35:41] space and also how to show up for them. Because there's a level I found very interesting. And I read Option B. I don't know if you've ever heard of that book by Sharon Santal. Yes, Sharon Santal, yeah. Yeah. And she, it was in that time I was going through cancer, I had read that book. And I loved it because it framed something so well for me, not just as a patient, but as an individual, which is how are we showing up for people?

[00:36:07] So when people are ill or something has gone wrong or somebody has even died, don't even have to have an illness, but some adverse thing and we reach out, maybe we leave a voicemail or we text or we send an email where we can actually speak to them. And we always say, let me know what I can do for you. We put the onus back on the person that is needing the help to figure out and decipher what they need. There is still a level of accountability when you need something to be able to ask for it.

[00:36:35] But often when that is happening right at the initial moments, we don't know what we need. So just show up for somebody, drop off a meal, go buy, bring flour, whatever it is you're going to do the gesture without asking them to tell you what the gesture is that they need, because you'll find it if you keep that engagement up. And so there's with the book and as a whole, there's a lot of different areas you can get from it.

[00:37:01] But what I will say is that with each story that is listed, there's also grace notes at the end, like cliff notes in a sense. But it really highlights what each woman has gone through and noticed to bring into life, right? Asking for permission, rejecting needing control over everything, how to show up for their children when it's hard for them to show up at all.

[00:37:25] So anyhow, those grace notes are really, I think, those are a little different than maybe the chicken soup for the soul, but has that kind of vibe. It's not as scientific. I don't pretend to be in the world of being a doctor or anything in that area. But what I am is I'm a person that found connections between them and things that surprised me, right? How do they show up for their children? How do they maintain a sense of normalcy? How do they go to work and can they still thrive in that environment?

[00:37:55] How do they move forward when the life that they were looking at is no longer what they expected? So navigate. Tell me what it's called, because you're telling us a lot about it, but I don't know what it's called. Where to get my paws on it? It's called Canvas of Courage. And for young mothers facing cancer, the art of healing, hope, and gratitude. And where can we get it? And you can get it on Amazon. It is sold worldwide. Amazon, Barnes and Nobles online as well.

[00:38:24] And that would be for the paperback and the Kindle version. I also do have an audio book out because many of us don't have time to read often, especially if you're a working parent. So you can listen to it in the car. And that is available on Amazon, Apple Books, and Audible. Very good. And if we want to find out more about you and the side of you and the work that you do, how do we do that?

[00:38:51] Yeah, I'd say that for anyone that might be curious about me or the ideas I've been sharing, they can visit narissaballand.com. And maybe in our notes, we'll spell it out because I don't have a common name, but narissaballand.com. And you can download there. I have a free creative reset guide. It's a collection of simple exercises designed to help people build awareness and reflect on experiences and explore their creativity for personal growth.

[00:39:20] And then you can also find out more about the book, my workshops, and artwork, and arts and health work. Brilliant. Nariss, it's been a joy to meet you today and to listen to your views, opinions on resilience and also the book as well. It sounds absolutely fascinating. And good luck in six months' time when you go back and final checkup, I think. And we're all rooting for you. Thank you. Thanks for spending time with us today. You take care.

[00:39:48] Hi, I hope you found that episode useful and entertaining. If you want to support our work, please go to resilienceunravel.com. And you can become a member there as well. You can also send us a question there and even apply to do a podcast. You can also leave a review on Apple Podcasts or any of the other podcast hosts of your choice, as well as getting hold of some useful resources about resilience and a whole lot more.

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