But the Smith Center, just a hop and a skip away on the metro line, seems most reasonable and feasible, even though Hawaii is so tempting. Besides, the staff at the center have basically waived my registration fee, so now I have no excuse. I trudge through the snow and ice and arrive at the center, a pretty brownstone anchored by an art gallery with amenities including a spacious modern test kitchen, and plenty of space for meetings and rest and respite.

There are 16 of us and we are a smorgasboard of ages, ethnicities and backgrounds. But all of us share one thing in common - we’ve all been diagnosed and treated for cancer or are still being treated. On the surface, many of us (myself included) appear healthy, while there are a few attendees who are clearly undergoing treatment. A couple of women are wearing pretty head scarves to cover up their heads that have gone bald from chemotherapy. One woman is as thin as a rail, and looks close to death. For some strange reason I find myself trying to avert her gaze.

Despite the reality of this awful disease we tackle the retreat with the exuberance of summer camp and give everything a try. There’s the yoga session, there’s the writing session where we are treated to a poetry reading and then attempt to put our feelings on paper, and then we are asked who wants to share. There is lunch where we are treated to a freshly cooked meal, and a brief lesson on how to eat healthy (basically eat fresh and pack in the vegetables). The meal is indeed very healthy - a bean soup, quinoa pilaf, a carrot, snap pea and ginger salad, and for dessert, blueberry soup topped with coconut crème. I suddenly feel very guilty having recently lapsed into once again craving vending machine cuisine - the M&M’s, the potato chips and the fizzy artificially colored sodas. The meal is a reminder that I should fuel myself with healthier foods.

In the meantime, I am connecting with new friends, many of them around my age, somewhere in the spectrum of their 30s to early 40s. There are a handful of women with breast cancer, an older man with a grizzly white beard, who survived stage four cancer of some rare kind, a young woman who was recently slammed again with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, and a young man who looks relatively fit and healthy who I later find out has cancer that has spread to his liver. How could someone who looks so healthy be so sick? I ask myself that same question as I wolf down my very healthy meal.

Amongst the company of people who have gone through a similar journey as myself, I feel somewhat liberated. There are moments when we are together, sharing our own stories, when I shake my head in disbelief. There is the rail thin woman who is also a single mother with young children, who struggles with how much to share with them and how much to shield from them. There is the woman who just survived a series of challenges in life including a hip replacement and a very challenging graduate degree only to be diagnosed with cancer in the past month. We are asked by a professional counselor what we’ve learned from this experience, and words surface: gratitude, positivity, finding ourselves closer with family and appreciation.

“Focus,” I say. “Cancer has made me more focused. I don’t feel like I have to cave into peer pressure and do things that I don’t want to do.” Heads nod. I just know they get it. They totally understand and I don’t need to explain. Outside the snow falls harder, it is beautiful. I don’t want to leave this space that I am in. I finally feel at home.