The last lesson Chris-Tia Donaldson left the world
On presence, peace & finding your Bali within
Picture this. Chris-Tia Donaldson who has just survived cancer is sitting in a hotel room in Bali, Indonesia, watching a jungle stretch for miles, listening to a river crash far below. She is cancer-free. She has no inbox, no schedule, no performance to give. For once, her soul is quiet. And she realized — terrifyingly — that this feeling is not something she can pack into your carry-on.
This is where Chris-Tia Donaldson found herself in the opening pages of her book This Is Only a Test: What Breast Cancer Taught Me about Faith, Love, Hair, and Business. CEO, lawyer, entrepreneur, and author — she had built a life full of achievement and almost none of the stillness that makes achievement feel like anything at all.
Sadly, she passed away on November 13, 2021, after a long battle with cancer. But the wisdom she left behind in this book — particularly in that very first chapter — is the kind that follows you home.
The woman who almost stayed in Bali
On her last morning in Bali, Chris-Tia visited a spiritual reader in a small restaurant off the beaten path in Kuta. She was skeptical. Forty-five minutes in, she was ready to leave. Then the reader said something that stopped her:
“Look, girl. It’s not about Bali the place. It’s about finding the Bali within you.”
— The spiritual reader, as recounted by Chris-Tia Donaldson.
For a woman who had traveled to Mexico, Jamaica, Vietnam, Greece, Italy, South Africa — always in search of that feeling — this was the thing she’d been circling around her whole life. She would fly somewhere beautiful, exhale, come home, and two weeks later feel like she needed another escape. Sound familiar?
The problem was never the destinations. The problem was that she was a tourist in her own life.
What it means to live now
One of the most striking details in the chapter is a small, almost throwaway moment. On her way to the airport the day she left for Bali, Chris-Tia checked her work email. Sitting untouched for nine months — the length of her cancer leave — were thousands of unread messages. One caught her eye immediately: a note from her company’s general counsel, informing the team that a woman in the office had died after battling breast cancer.
She describes the “oh shit” moment that erupted inside her. Here was the mirror. Here was the thing she couldn’t look away from.
She had been living like there would always be a next week to slow down, a next year to be present, a next vacation to finally feel peace. Cancer — and this email — made that logic impossible to sustain.
This is what makes her story so different from the usual “live in the moment” advice. She’s not a wellness influencer telling you to take a deep breath. She’s a woman who built a company, practiced corporate law, lost her mother to cancer in high school, and then got cancer herself — and even after all of that, she still almost went back to running on empty. The pull of productivity is that strong. The habit of deferring rest is that deep.
Creating your Bali within
So, what does “finding the Bali within” actually look like? Chris-Tia doesn’t leave it abstract. By the end of that last day in paradise, she had begun to understand it:
It means being grateful for where you already are. It means creating boundaries — real ones, not performative ones. It means spending time with people who nourish you. It means making your everyday life one you genuinely want to come home to, not one you’re always trying to escape.
Vacation, she realized, is a state of mind. Peace is not a place on a map. It’s a practice. And the practice begins not when you can finally afford the flight, but right now, in whatever ordinary Tuesday you’re living.
“I had to make it a life I wanted to come home to, a life that I felt relaxed in, a life that had more meaning than just being a CEO.”
— Chris-Tia Donaldson, This Is Only a Test
This is the sentence I keep returning to. Not “a life I was proud of.” Not “a life I had optimized.” A life she wanted to come home to.
Why this book matters now
We live in a culture that rewards busyness like a virtue. The person with the fullest calendar, the most going on, the biggest juggle — that’s the person we call impressive. Chris-Tia Donaldson was that person. And then cancer forced a pause she never would have chosen for herself.
Most of us won’t have a cancer diagnosis to shake us awake. We’ll just slowly drift into lives we’re vaguely dissatisfied with, numbing the edges with scrolling and weekend plans and the fantasy of some future version of ourselves who has finally figured it all out.
This book — and especially this first chapter — is a gentle, firm hand on the shoulder. It asks: What are you waiting for? What would it look like to be present in your life as it is, not as you’re planning it to be?
Chris-Tia didn’t get the long, unhurried life she deserved. But she figured out what it was supposed to feel like. And she wrote it down for us.
This Is Only a Test
This Is Only a Test: What Breast Cancer Taught Me about Faith, Love, Hair, and Business
Chris-Tia Donaldson · CEO & founder of Thank God It’s Natural (tgin) 1974 – November 13, 2021
Salima
Just me thinking out loud over here