The Power of Being Called to Create

Excerpted from Uncertainty by Jonathan Fields by arrangement with Portfolio Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA), Inc., Copyright (c) 2011 by Jonathan Fields.

On Valentine’s Day in 2003, at the age of thirty-one, Kris Carr was diagnosed with a very rare form of cancer that had already progressed to stage 4 and spread to her liver and lungs. Her first doctor recommended removing the organs and waiting for a transplant, which seemed a horrifying course of treatment to Carr, one she ultimately refused to accept. She set out on a mission to reclaim her health and to find the best doctor in the world for this extraordinarily rare disease. She found him in Boston, and though his practice was closed, she convinced him to take her on as a patient. They began to work together, and early on he told her that her cancer was very slow-growing; he recommended that she go out and live life as fully as possible.

The experience created a different frame, a new story line for her life. Until then, she’d been an actress for pretty much her entire working life, but she had always had a Jones to get behind the camera—to be the one telling the stories. This was her moment. She had nothing to lose. So in addition to radically changing her lifestyle and nutrition in a quest to become as healthy as possible, she set out to create a documentary about her journey called Crazy, Sexy Cancer. She wanted to tell a story about not lying down and waiting for death, about rising up and living not under but beyond the shadow of one of the scariest words on the planet.

Everyone around her thought she was nuts. Nobody would want to see a movie about cancer, let alone buy or show it. And the title, sexy and cancer together? With her condition, she was told, she shouldn’t be doing things that would cause her so much stress. But Carr didn’t listen. She couldn’t. This was the thing she couldn’t not do. Her calling came from a death sentence that had given her permission to live. Damned if anyone else was going to take that away from her.

Continued on page 2: A guide to her calling... »