How to cope when life throws you a curveball

Emma Markezic has written a book, Curveballs: How to keep it together when life tries to tear you a new one. What would this young, attractive millennial know about curveballs, I ask myself. Her resume resonates with terms all those young people who are avoiding getting an actual job say they've done: columnist, comedian, writing about wellness and feminism, fashion and fitness. Millions, apparently, have read her work in Vogue, Marie Claire, GQ, on Buzzfeed.

Her bio wraps up with the words: "She lives in ... well who cares really. She lives."

Oh please. Let's catch up and I'll throw you a few curveballs.

But as I started to read Curveballs I found myself dog-earring pages, underlining phrases, actually doing the practical steps Markezic suggests might help you handle the shitty things life throws your way.

When we catch up at Little National Hotel in Barton, the first thing I do is admit to her how wrong I was. That her experiences resonated with me, that her practical advice is something I've been searching for for a few years now.

Could recovery, if that's the right word, be as easy as listening to Wonderwall? And we'll get back to that.

Markezic, who grew up in Canberra, was 34 when she was diagnosed with breast cancer.

"I don't think anyone ever expects a cancer diagnosis," she says.

"But I decided then there wasn't anything I could do about that, I went straight to dealing with the outcome, whatever that would be.

"There's this place you go through before you have a prognosis, you go through this process where you don't know if you're going to live or die, so you think OK, if this is it for me, how do I feel about that?

"And I felt OK, about that, in a way. I didn't regret things I hadn't done. I thought, if this is it, I don't want to waste what time I have left feeling bad about the fact I'm dying, I just wanted to enjoy what time I might have left."

Friends and family around her seemed to be having a harder time dealing with things. As she went through a year of treatment, lost her hair, endured chemo, watched women around her at the treatment facility - the Chris O'Brien Lifehouse, "a wonderful place" - fall to pieces, she had to admit to herself she was handling it all pretty well.

"I thought, what is it about me that means I can handle this this way? At times I was handling cancer better than some people handle a paper cut," she says.

"I couldn't understand why that was, was it something I was born with, something learned in childhood? I'd never noticed if I was always like that, but thinking back to past trauma, maybe some people are mentally stronger in the way some people are physically stronger."

So, ever the inquisitive one, Markezic decided to investigate the idea that there may be a scientific reason why some people handle trauma better than others. She spent 12 months talking to experts, people who had worked with survivors of 9/11, the Bali bombings, the Port Arthur massacre, doctors, psychologists, academics.

"And what I found is this is something that can be taught, the brain is a muscle and you can train it in certain ways to be more resilient," she says.

"We talk a lot in the self-help sphere about happiness - happiness has been the big buzzword for the past several years - but it's not happiness we need, it's resilience and that elusive happiness is a by-product of resilience."

She says, as a writer, everyone assumed she would be "journalling the journey" of her cancer diagnosis.

"But I loathe the word 'journey', that was never going to happen, I wanted to find some practical things to do and wrap it all up in something easy to read."

And Curveballs is just that. It's hilarious at times, as Markezic recounts periods of her recovery. There's a continual thread of her relationship with her partner Kieran - "Thanks for having sex with me when I was horny, bald and had surgical tubes coming out of me," she writes in the acknowledgements. "He hates that!" she laughs.

The pair met while Markezic was undergoing chemotherapy.

"I was coping OK with it all and it was weird that the one thing that really bothered me was that if I did die, I might never fall in love again," she says.

"At the time of the diagnosis I was single, living alone and broke ... and I guessed the one thing I thought was, if I died I wouldn't get married, I would never have kids, I would never snuggle on the lounge and watch a movie with someone again.

"And so that was the impetus for trying online dating in the middle of chemo." A lot of people thought it was the worst idea ever, but it turned out more than OK."

The pair are still together and living in the United States, where studying comedy and screen-writing and working on a project "loosely based on something".

She was born in Canberra in 1981 and lived in Evatt in a house her father built. She went to Miles Franklin Primary School, Melba High, Lake Ginninderra College and the University of Canberra before she headed for Sydney.

She's enjoying a few stolen days in her home town, glorious blue skies, that crisp autumnal air, changing colours. She's one of the most positive people I've ever met, a rapscallion even. (Read the book.)

"You can't change what has happened, you can only change what is going to happen," she says.

"People sometimes wallow in trauma and that's okay for a while, but you have to put a deadline on that because you are ruining your future because of the past and that's useless.

"I had cancer, I've had a bilateral mastectomy, I have to have my ovaries taken out next because I have the BRCA2 II, I have osteoporosis from the chemo, there's a lot to deal with still.

"But I have never been happier in my life because I have got through all of that and I realise how lucky I am to be here.

"I have a good head of hair again and have someone who loves me, I get to do what I want with the time I have left and it might not be the life I pictured before but that's okay."

She lives.

Curveballs: How to keep it together when life tries to tear you a new one. By Emma Markezic. HarperCollins. $32.99.

Wear superhero underwear: Ridiculous undies jolt you into happy, or at least out of self-pity for a fraction of a second. It interrupts your pattern of pain and sets you up for a far more positive start to the day.

Listen to Wonderwall by Oasis: Liam Gallagher hates the song. But you do not get to choose what you are defined by. Letting go of labels and embracing what's happened will make you a far more content person.

Bake a pie for someone else: Doing something meaningfully nice for someone else gives you a real sense of purpose - the impression of participating in something more important than just your own existence.

Write down your limiting belief then cross it out: What is your inhibiting brain worm? Write it down, literally cross it out. Do it again and again. The brain loves repetition. Be your own best cheerleader.

Plan a trip to space: Pick a whopper of a goal, commit to it. But set small goals too. An hour at a time. Get out of bed. Go for a walk. The glory is in the attempt, it doesn't matter that the outcome is.

Stay up past your bedtime: Do whatever it is that makes you forget what you have on tomorrow. Have a bath, bake cookies, read, whatever it is you find meditative. Find the thing that forces you to stay on task.