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Some moments in life change us quietly.
Others crack us open completely.

For Nicole Urbanek, that moment came at just thirty-three, when the life she knew split wide with a breast cancer diagnosis. It wasn’t just her body that changed — it was the way she understood loss, resilience, and who she truly was beneath it all.

Nicole is a teacher, a storyteller, and someone who has known grief long before cancer entered the picture — losing her father at twenty, and her brother just twelve years later. In the classroom, she found purpose and light. In her students, she found a reason to keep showing up, even on her darkest days.

In her Story Crafting piece, Cracked Open, Nicole invites us into a powerful metaphor — a life shaped like a set of nesting dolls. Each layer built from love, memory, heartbreak, and survival. Cancer didn’t destroy her. It revealed her — stripping away the noise and leaving only what truly matters.

This is a story about choosing not to orbit endlessly around what’s lost…
but reaching inward to find the next version of yourself waiting.

Because when life cracks you open, what you discover inside just might be stronger than you ever imagined.

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Still I Rise features stories from You Night's STORY CRAFTING COMMUNITY. To read additional stories, visit our Facebook page:

https://www.facebook.com/YouNightStories. Would you like to participate in a 6-week Story Crafting small group experience so that you can share your story? Write to us at teamyounight@gmail.com

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Some stories are not about how strong we are —
but about who carried us when we had no strength left.

When we first met Catrina Sullivan, she carried herself with strength —
and with walls.
Walls built over years of heartache.
Of people letting her down.
Of being taken advantage of.
Of learning the hard way that survival sometimes means staying guarded.

Her life has been shaped by battles most people never see —
childhood trauma, silence in the military, abuse, loss, motherhood carried alone.
And then, at thirty-nine, a diagnosis that stopped everything —
Stage Two HER2-Positive Breast Cancer.

But as our team circled the wagons around her, something shifted.
Catrina realized the love being offered wasn’t conditional or performative — it was real.
Safe.
Given freely, without expectation.

And still — this is not just a cancer story.

This is a testimony of faith forged in fire.
Of a woman who kept walking, not because the road was easy,
but because God never let her walk alone.

In He Carried Me Through the Sand, Catrina reflects on a life marked by struggle and resilience — and the unmistakable presence of God in every chapter. When her strength failed, His did not. When she could no longer stand, He carried her.

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Still I Rise features stories from You Night's STORY CRAFTING COMMUNITY. To read additional stories, visit our Facebook page:

https://www.facebook.com/YouNightStories. Would you like to participate in a 6-week Story Crafting small group experience so that you can share your story? Write to us at teamyounight@gmail.com

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What does it mean to survive when life never gives you time to rest?

In this powerful episode of Still I Rise, Cat Black shares her extraordinary story of surviving breast cancer and leukemia — not once, but twice — while raising two young children. Diagnosed with breast cancer at 36 with a four-year-old and a five-month-old at home, Cat fought not just for herself, but for her family. Just as life began to stabilize, a second diagnosis — leukemia — burned everything down again.

Through hospital isolation, failed chemotherapy, and a life-saving stem cell transplant from a perfect international donor, Cat rose from the ashes — scarred, transformed, and stronger than before.

Using the metaphor of the phoenix, Cat reflects on survival, motherhood, identity, and the relentless fires that shape a woman when she has no choice but to rise. This episode is a testament to maternal strength, resilience, and the quiet sparks that keep us going even in the darkest moments.

If you’ve ever faced cancer, cared for a loved one, or wondered how people survive the unimaginable — this story will stay with you long after the episode ends.

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Still I Rise features stories from You Night's STORY CRAFTING COMMUNITY. To read additional stories, visit our Facebook page:

https://www.facebook.com/YouNightStories. Would you like to participate in a 6-week Story Crafting small group experience so that you can share your story? Write to us at teamyounight@gmail.com

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For more than twenty years, Tara Warner has stood at the bedside of people facing cancer.

As an oncology nurse, she’s walked thousands of patients through diagnosis, treatment, fear, and hope — always reminding them that the mental battle is at least fifty percent of the fight.

But everything shifted when Tara crossed the line from caregiver to patient… when she herself was diagnosed with breast cancer.

In that moment, she saw what the system doesn’t have time to hold — the emotional fallout, the identity loss, the quiet unraveling that happens when life splits in two. Bodies are treated. Diseases are managed. But the mind and spirit are often left to carry the weight alone.

What followed wasn’t just illness — it was awakening.

In her Story Crafting piece, Becoming, Tara shares a life shaped by eruption and rebuilding — storms, loss, and the moment she made a powerful decision:
“I will not rebuild what broke me.”

Not the patterns.
Not the silence.
Not the version of life that required her to disappear to survive.

This is a story about choosing a new blueprint.
About becoming truer instead of tougher.
About honoring the mind and spirit with the same urgency we give the body.

This is Tara’s rise.

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Still I Rise features stories from You Night's STORY CRAFTING COMMUNITY. To read additional stories, visit our Facebook page:

https://www.facebook.com/YouNightStories. Would you like to participate in a 6-week Story Crafting small group experience so that you can share your story? Write to us at teamyounight@gmail.com

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Once upon a time, in a quiet land of shifting skies and whispering winds, lived a girl named Denise.
In her village, children didn’t build houses from wood or stone — they built them from beliefs.

Denise learned early how to build.
Be small.
Be silent.
Keep the peace.
Don’t shine too brightly.

So she built carefully. Brick by brick. Approval by approval.
A house that looked strong on the outside — but never quite felt like home.

She grew, succeeded, achieved… and then one day, a storm arrived.
A breast cancer diagnosis that shook the foundation and asked the questions she could no longer avoid:
Am I living the life I want?
And who am I, really?

In the rubble, Denise heard her own voice for the first time — quiet, steady, true — whispering,
“There’s another way.”

This is the story of rebuilding.
Of choosing alignment over applause.
Of learning that worth is not earned — it’s remembered.

Welcome to Still I Rise —
where storms become awakenings,
healing becomes a choice,
and coming home to yourself is the bravest thing you can do.

Welcome to my guest, Denise Whittaker.

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Still I Rise features stories from You Night's STORY CRAFTING COMMUNITY. To read additional stories, visit our Facebook page:

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Today on Still I Rise, you’re going to meet a woman who describes herself through the image of a firefly—small, steady, and lit from within, flickering even when everything around her feels dark.

Our guest, Dawn Freret, was stepping into a new chapter: rebuilding after a painful divorce, raising her boys, and finding love again—ready to turn 50 and see it as the beginning of the second half of her story. But then a routine mammogram became a biopsy… and in February 2025, Dawn was diagnosed with Stage 2 HER2-positive breast cancer.

Before treatment could begin, her oncologist ordered a standard echocardiogram—just to make sure her heart could handle the drugs. What it revealed stopped everything: an ejection fraction of only 20 percent. Dawn felt fine. She was active. No symptoms. And yet she was in heart failure.

In an instant, she was carrying two diagnoses—breast cancer and congestive heart failure—and her cancer treatment paused before it ever started. For six long months, she had to wait as her heart became the priority, learning a new kind of bravery: trusting her doctors, trusting timing, and allowing people to hold some of the weight.

And along the way, Dawn learned to look for what she calls “glimmers”—tiny sparks of joy, gratitude, and peace that still appear in dark seasons.

This is Dawn’s story entitled "Dancing through the Darknesss". It's a story of resilience, vulnerability, and hope—of not just surviving the darkness… but learning to light it up and dance through it.

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Still I Rise features stories from You Night's STORY CRAFTING COMMUNITY. To read additional stories, visit our Facebook page:

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Welcome to Still I Rise, where we celebrate women who have walked through the darkest seasons and found a way to bloom again. Today, we step into the garden of Kathy Cole — a woman whose life has always been rooted in soil, color, and connection. From planting vegetables with her dad to creating Friendship Gardens in every home she’s lived in, Kathy has always believed that growth is something we share.

But in 2020, Kathy’s world shifted into a harsh winter. For months, she couldn’t clear her throat. As a mammographer, she worried — worried she might be sick, worried her coughing would alarm her patients, and worried something deeper was wrong. One sleepless night, guided by instinct, she picked up a flashlight, shined it into her mouth… and saw the tumor that would change everything.

The diagnosis was staggering: spindle-cell/sclerosing rhabdomyosarcoma, an extremely rare cancer more commonly found in males and almost never seen in adults. When she finally found a medical team who sort of knew how to treat it, they told her something unimaginable — that they could find only three cases like hers in the entire world.

What followed was a storm of surgeries, chemo, radiation, a tracheostomy, a feeding tube, and 126 days in the hospital during COVID — alone, afraid, and fighting for every breath. And yet, even in that deep winter, hope bloomed. A friend from Hawaii shared a dream of Kathy healed, wrapped with a scripture printed over a yellow dinner-plate dahlia — the flower her father once tended with pride. It became her sign that the garden wasn’t done with her yet.

With the unwavering love of her daughters, Morgan and Miranda, Kathy slowly began to root herself back into life, rebuilding her strength, her voice, and her spirit. And she learned this truth: if something isn’t growing where it is, you can move it… water it… tend it… and choose to bloom again.

This is Kathy’s Garden.
This is how she still rises.

#spindle-cell/sclerosing rhabdomyosarcoma

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Still I Rise features stories from You Night's STORY CRAFTING COMMUNITY. To read additional stories, visit our Facebook page:

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Some women survive storms.
But Kelli Beckman has weathered entire skies.

For much of her life, Kelli coped by imagining herself tethered to a hot-air balloon, floating safely above the clouds. When joy called—marriage, children, a career—she’d lower her lines and touch the ground. When life hurt, she drifted back up.

But over time, her balloon developed a leak. Divorce, the death of a parent, the loss of a job, and the passing of her best friend all struck at once. And then, at just thirty-six, she heard the words no mother of four—one still a baby—ever expects: cancer. She floated through treatments, surgeries, and fear, praying for the clouds to part. They didn’t. Still, she survived.

Years later, she faced her fiercest storm: stage 4 cancer. Her doctors told her to get her affairs in order. Had she accepted that as her ending, she would have missed the life God still intended for her. She lived to see another Christmas—one she wasn’t expected to reach—and realized she hadn’t gone above the storm. She had gone through it.

One of her greatest lessons came from a friend offering to help. Kelli, fiercely independent, resisted. Her friend gently said, “When God places it on someone’s heart to help you—let them. If you don’t, you’re blocking their blessing.” That truth changed her.

More hardships followed, including the heartbreak of her husband leaving. There were more recurrences, more setbacks—but also more miracles. She watched two sons marry. She heard little voices call her “Grandma.” She saw her youngest begin college. All moments she would have missed… if she had listened to the doctors.

Kelli’s journey reminds us that faith doesn’t always lift us out of the storm—sometimes it strengthens our legs to walk through it.

And no matter how many times life tried to pull her down…

Still, she rises.

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Still I Rise features stories from You Night's STORY CRAFTING COMMUNITY. To read additional stories, visit our Facebook page:

https://www.facebook.com/YouNightStories. Would you like to participate in a 6-week Story Crafting small group experience so that you can share your story? Write to us at teamyounight@gmail.com