🧠 Rewriting the Narrator: Why I Joined the Freedom Program

Ten days ago, I was preparing to celebrate my birthday with something I never thought I’d live long enough to receive: the quiet relief of still being here. For those who’ve read The Cancer Diet, you know how close I came to not seeing this year at all. The book was supposed to be a kind of farewell.

Instead, it became a beginning.

That beginning hasn’t been clean or gentle. I’m still walking through heartbreak, creative fatigue, health scares, panic attacks, and awkward days behind the counter of a new Starbucks. I’m still figuring out what recovery actually looks like—when it doesn’t follow a straight line or deliver a perfect epiphany.

And then, quietly, an opportunity showed up in my inbox.

I had applied for a scholarship to Peter Crone’s Freedom Membership, a self-guided program built around the core idea that our lives are shaped not by what happens to us, but by the unconscious beliefs we form about ourselves in response. If you haven’t heard of Crone, he’s been called “The Mind Architect,” and while that title sounds like something out of a Christopher Nolan film, the work he does is stunningly simple: he helps people rewire their relationship to suffering.

And I have plenty of that to work with.

In my application, I shared openly about living with bipolar disorder and anxiety. I told them I’m doing the work—I’m in therapy, I’m writing, I’m trying—but sometimes that work feels like swimming upstream against a river of old stories. Stories about abandonment, shame, failure, not being enough.

Peter’s work doesn’t claim to erase that pain. It doesn’t promise you bliss or healing in a week. But it does ask one powerful question:

Who would you be without the story that you are broken?

That question landed hard. Because for the last few months, even as I’ve written and published and survived, I’ve still felt like a hand grenade with the pin pulled. And no amount of kindness or ambition or productivity can quiet that sense of internal volatility when it’s rooted in a deep narrative about your own unworthiness.

So I’m stepping into this program not as a miracle seeker, but as someone willing to let go of a few scripts. Maybe not all at once. Maybe not forever. But long enough to ask if there’s something else on the other side of that self-contempt. Something freer.

I’m deeply grateful for the scholarship. I don’t take it lightly. This isn’t just a new tool—it’s a lifeline at a time when I could easily disappear back into silence.

If you’re reading this and wondering what “freedom” even means in a world like ours, maybe you’re closer to this work than you think. Not everyone needs Peter Crone. But everyone carries a story about themselves that was written in survival, not in love. And every once in a while, we get the chance to ask if that story is still true.

I’m going to find out.