Finding a new way forward

Lifestyle – A diagnosis of cancer six years ago led to Celine O’Donovan making radical changes to her life. She has now written a book about her journey and how any crisis can be a catalyst for change. Celine knows the effort involved and if her account can help helps one person, she’ll be happy as she tells JUDY MURPHY.

Celine O’Donovan pauses in our interview and wonders: “is that what I want inscribed on my tombstone – she paid her mortgage?”

The question is rhetorical – because she’s very sure of her answer. Celine had a career in marketing from the 1990s until 2016 when she was diagnosed with breast cancer, an event that transformed her life. The diagnosis led her on a voyage of self-discovery, and to writing a book about her experience and what she’s learned along the way.

Celine isn’t remotely dissing people for paying their mortgages, what she’s doing with Gifts from the Devastation: What Cancer Taught me About Life is showing how a crisis can be a catalyst for someone to grow and change.

“I want to support people who are making a change but don’t know how to do it yet,” she says. “I don’t claim to have any answers. I’m just telling my story. But we all have a moment when there’s no going back.”

The Salthill woman stresses that the crisis doesn’t have to be cancer. People can all deal with and learn from the adversities that we’ll all experience at some stage of life.

Her moment came in 2016. Being diagnosed with breast cancer led her to dealing with fundamental issues that had been niggling at her for years but which she’d never addressed – because she was too busy.

Celine’s life might have looked ideal from the outside but she was struggling and had been for years.

“I was suppressing a lot of who I was. I never felt I fitted in.”

After graduating from the then UCG with an arts degree in the late 1980s, she did a post-grad in marketing at the RTC, now part of ATU.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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