Broken Crayons Still Color: When Survival Changes You
- Surviving Breast Cancer
- 1 day ago
- 4 min read
By Nerissa Balland EDUCATION | COMPLEMENTARY THERAPIES
Surviving cancer and processing the experience of cancer are two very different things.
Medical teams prepare you for surgery. They prepare you for treatment, side effects, scans, and follow-up appointments. They do everything they can to help preserve your life. What very few people prepare you for is what happens after the immediate crisis begins to settle.
Listen to Nerissa on the SBC podcast, Breast Cancer Conversations:
When treatment ends, everyone celebrates. The scans are clear. Friends tell you how strong you are. Family members are relieved. Life slowly begins moving forward. Yet many survivors discover that survival isn’t the same as feeling whole again.
That was certainly true for me. I was five months pregnant when I was diagnosed with metastatic melanoma. Overnight, my world became appointments, surgeries, treatment decisions, and the uncertainty of whether I would live long enough to raise my children.
When my dermatologist called to tell me the biopsy was malignant, my mind raced through every role I held—wife, daughter, artist, mother. But beneath all of those thoughts was something smaller and infinitely more fragile: a heartbeat. The heartbeat of the child I had fought years of infertility to conceive. In that moment, cancer wasn’t simply threatening my life. It challenged everything I believed about motherhood, identity, purpose, and the future I imagined for my family.
Like so many people facing a life-threatening illness, my focus became singular: survive. My medical team gave me that chance, and I will always be grateful. What no one prepared me for was the emotional landscape waiting on the other side.
Although my body was healing, I wasn’t returning to the woman I had been before cancer. One day I caught my reflection in the mirror and didn’t recognize the person looking back at me. That realization frightened me more than the disease itself because I understood I wasn’t simply trying to recover physically—I was trying to understand who I had become.
Cancer changed my body. Survival changed my identity. Learning how to reconcile the two became the real work.
I’m a professionally trained artist. Most people assume creativity naturally became my refuge. It didn’t. Years of training had taught me to focus on technique and whether something looked “good.” Even after cancer, I was still evaluating what I created instead of allowing creativity to become a place of curiosity.
Everything changed when I participated in a facilitated creative experience where there was no expectation to make something beautiful. For the first time, process mattered more than product. That’s when I realized: Creativity wasn’t helping me process cancer. It was helping me process myself.
Cancer was the catalyst. It changed the trajectory of my life, but it also awakened a journey I never expected to take—one of reconnecting with myself through creativity, reflection, and ultimately helping others do the same.
I couldn’t stop wondering if I was alone. Over the next several years, I interviewed more than one hundred young mothers facing cancer. Those conversations became the foundation of my book, Canvas of Courage. While my own diagnosis was metastatic melanoma, approximately 80% of the women I interviewed—and nearly three-quarters of the stories featured in the book—were navigating breast cancer.
Although every woman’s story was unique, the emotional themes were remarkably familiar. Identity had been disrupted. The future felt uncertain. Women carried fear, guilt, grief, hope, and the pressure to remain strong for everyone else.
Time and again, I saw creativity emerge—not as artistic talent, but as a way of making sense of lives that no longer felt familiar.
One woman held dance parties with her children during treatment. Another took “mental photographs” of the sky before treatment because she wanted to remember the last ordinary day before everything changed. Another knitted while waiting for scan results.
None of these women were trying to become artists. They were trying to remain themselves.
Those conversations eventually led me to therapeutic arts and the broader field of arts in health. I discovered that what I had experienced personally wasn’t unique. Around the world, hospitals, cancer centers, and community organizations were using creative expression to support reflection, emotional processing, coping, and meaning-making.
Creativity wasn’t replacing medicine. It was addressing something medicine was never designed to do.
Today, my work brings together therapeutic arts, evidence-informed practices, and reflective approaches to help people reconnect with themselves and rebuild identity and purpose after life’s most difficult experiences.
People aren’t broken. They’re unprocessed.
That doesn’t mean we’re flawed or need fixing. It means many of us are carrying experiences we’ve never been given the space to fully examine, express, understand, or integrate.
I’ve watched women walk into workshops apologizing before we even begin. “I'm not creative,” they’ll tell me.
I smile, because I’ve heard those words so many times before.
An hour later, something has shifted. The room grows quiet. The pressure to make something beautiful disappears. More than once, someone has looked up and said, “I didn’t realize how much I needed that.”
That’s why I often say, “Broken crayons still color.”
As an artist, I find there’s something special about opening a brand-new box of crayons. Every color is perfectly wrapped. Every point is sharp. Untouched.
But if you’ve ever sat beside a child making art, you know those aren’t the crayons they reach for forever. Eventually the wrappers peel away. The tips break. Some snap in half.
And yet… They still color. Not despite being broken. Because they’re still crayons. Their form changed. Not their purpose.
I believe the same is true for us. Cancer may change our bodies. Survival may change our identity. We may never return to the person we were before our diagnosis.
But we are still capable of creating, loving, contributing, finding meaning, and beginning again. Because healing isn’t only about surviving. It’s about reconnecting with the parts of ourselves we thought were lost.
We may color differently than we did before. But we still color.
Read More:
On the Podcast: Breast Cancer Conversations
Episode 310: Surviving Cancer Is Only the Beginning: How to Process What Comes After
