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 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.
