This is a love story: the story of how I learn to love myself.
I survived cancer to find myself lost and alone. I had left my partner of 13 years just before the diagnosis. Many people left me after: the new man, some old friends.
The only place I found comfort and felt love was when I practiced yoga or was writing and drawing.
These skills gave me shelter and enabled me to write and illustrate three emotional support books for cancer patients.
I self published them as I was recovering and with two good friends started a non-profit to market the books and to help women with breast cancer. I felt powerful again, creative and filled with a desire to share the realization that losing everything you think is important, like I did with cancer, can help free you to find the things that feed your soul.
But all this action after so much sickness was debilitating. I went to Tulum, Mexico for a break and to just stop.
There, I felt good for the first time in a long time. “Wouldn’t it be great to bring every survivor here, just for a week or so?” I said to my friend as we sat on the beach.
That became my dream and then my obsession: a place to bring survivors for rest and recuperation and a place to find myself. I was certain that I had found the cure for cancer: happiness.
I shared my dream and people encouraged me. I incorporated the concept into my non-profit and created the mission: to sell my books to give cash grants to patients from the sales and to bring survivors to Mexico. I would do something big.
But the man I fell in love with was a drug addict and a con. I refused to see it. I was so afraid of losing the opportunity to change my life that I held onto him, bought untitled property with his name on the papers using a friend’s money to do so.
My plan was to work in the US to fund the building while he managed the project in Mexico. I traveled between Miami where, desperate to escape my past, I had purchased a condo before I met Mexico, Boston for family and doctors, D.C. where I was writing environmental policy papers for the government, Philadelphia where my foundation was supported, and then Mexico where I was unknowingly supporting a sub culture of small time crooks.
I was genuinely surprised when I discovered the reality that my boyfriend’s plan was to rob me of everything. When I woke up and fought to take back my dream, he tried to kill me.
Finally, Joanne Fanny Barry, the love queen, was in the middle of narco-trafficers and con artists as she built her dream life.
Through a series of misadventures, I faced facts, looked at my addiction to an unreal life based on denial, and left the people who abused me so that I could truly love myself. And I started to build my dream in spite of or because of it all.
I learn the language, adapt to the culture without losing my own and build my casita in the jungle as I rebuild myself. I bring survivors, give money to women in need and start to teach yoga as I gradually rise above the baseness and grab that part of paradise that is good: the part that is within yourself.
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About the Author
A cancer diagnosis helped Fanny Barry morph from a science and engineering writer to creative writing and fiction. She published her first creative work, illustrated emotional support booklets called, I Wish I Knew, Notes from a Breast Cancer Survivor in 2006.
Possessed by a need to move after her cancer treatments, Fanny systematically moved down the eastern US coast. She stopped at the edge of the Mexican Caribbean believing she'd found a place to die. But she didn't. She built a non-profit to help women in treatment and brought them to the rustic bungalows she built for rest and recuperation. During these years she wrote, Map of Life and Beauty, her memoir. It tells the captivating story of how she rebuilt her life in Tulum, Mexico.
Eco-Woman: the Transformation and Eco Woman Initiation are the 1st two of a series of fantasy fictions that tell the spellbinding story of a female engineer who receives superpowers from Celtic Krones living in the northern forests of the Northeastern US. They give her a mission to save the world, one adventure at a time. Read what the reviewers are saying about Eco Woman and escape with her into a place where we all have super powers.
While coordinating her creative projects, Fanny runs yoga and dive retreats at her boutique yoga shalla called Tribal Tulum in Tulum, Mexico.
My Podcast is on Spotify, Nobody’s Nobody and highlights some amazing everyday heroes while talking about how each of us can make the world a better place and a little about Eco Woman.
