‘Breast Cancer is Not a Pink Ribbon’
You want to be breast cancer aware?
Here is breast cancer in all its reality: http://www.thescarproject.org. I thought about writing ‘in its ugly reality’, but these images are not ugly. Disturbing, but not ugly. These women are beautiful in their courage and their strength. The raw beauty of these images is amazing and this is the reality of breast cancer that should be shared with everyone, not the pretty images the media touts each October.
From the start of this journey (for want of a better word) I have not wanted to be associated with a couple of things that I feel I am now forever linked to, labels I am stuck with when I do not want to be labelled!
One is the whole pinkness of breast cancer. I just don’t do pink, it is far too girly twirly and I really cannot carry off the whole thing. Part of that is, obviously, my perceptions regarding what I tend to think of as ‘pink pathetic’. Whilst I enjoy dressing up for a night out or for special events, I am not sold on being all girly and feel somewhat of a fake when I wear dresses or try too hard to be ‘pretty’. This is similar to my feeling that someone is going to notice that I am not an adult. I keep waiting for that one person to start yelling that I am an imposter. Long story short, I don’t want to be a pink ribboner!
The second label I want to avoid is that of being a victim. I am not a victim. That, to me, implies a thinking enemy and a deliberate attack. Cancer is an abnormality, a growth. There is no war happening here, no battles, no fighting an enemy. There is simply living or not living, treatment or no treatment – and that is a choice that is easy to make. I don’t have to do much, no big battle, no enemy to vanquish.
Others may approach breast cancer, or any cancer, in a different way. They may see it as a great battle to be won, an enemy to defeat over and over until they emerge victorious and in remission. Perhaps my refusing to use this language says more about me wanting a reality where cancer was never a part of my lifeline than about me not wanting these labels. I could certainly do without the plastic fantastic and the scars accompanying it but some choices had to be made.
All of this is a somewhat longwinded introduction to a photographer whose work I admire. I freely admit that I wouldn’t have paid much attention to his work had I not been diagnosed with breast cancer, nor would his work have resonated so clearly with me. In a society that seems to want to think of women with breast cancer in the same manner as they are presented with women in adverts for sanitary products, David Jay is a realist. Breast cancer leaves scars and I, for one would rather be associated with these photographs than with the happy happy, joy joy folk that abound on too many breast cancer awareness sites.
As someone newly diagnosed with breast cancer, these images would have been scary but they would have also made me more aware of what exactly I would be going through and what I would be dealing with after the operation. Having a meeting with a doctor who talks quite matter of factly about cutting you up is somewhat disconcerting and the pictures I saw seemed almost unreal, being only pictures of the breast, not the person. I couldn’t equate my own person with the images I was being shown.
Go, take a look and then make sure that the women in your life are breast aware.
Musings of the Can(tan)cerous Kind ... (sic) 