Pink Ribbons Piss Me Off - How Breast Cancer Changed My Life & Why I Think Your Pink Is Performative

Every October, the ribbons come out. Sports teams wear pink cleats for one game and call it a statement. Companies slap a ribbon on their logo for a month and call it activism. And every year, I feel the same thing: nothing. Less than nothing, actually. A low simmer of irritation that I've spent six years trying to explain to people who mean well and still don't get it.

There Was No Ribbon For Being First

The only person I knew who'd had breast cancer died of it the year before I was diagnosed. Bone cancer, technically, but it started the same place mine did. So when I told people, every single conversation started the same way: "my [insert relative or family friend] had breast cancer too." And then a story about someone else. Someone older, someone who'd already fought it or already lost. I was scared and the sympathy I got was for someone who wasn't me.

Going Alone

I was going through a divorce at the same time—because one life-altering event wasn't enough. It was a lonely endeavor on its own.

Still, I didn't join a support group. I told myself I didn't have time, which was partly true and partly a lie I needed to tell myself. The bigger truth is that I didn't feel like I belonged with the women going through chemo, because I wasn't. Different protocol, different fight, same disease, wrong room. So I just went. Appointments, decisions, all of it, mostly by myself. Not because nobody offered, but because I couldn't find the version of this that looked like mine, and I was trying to make sense of it all in my head. I remember showing up for appointments at the cancer center at Rush feeling like I didn't belong there—and yet, I didn't belong anywhere else either.

I Didn’t Even Get A Ribbon After

Breast cancer didn't end when treatment did. It became the opening chapter of a much longer story: complications down the road, skipping reconstruction, a hysterectomy, dating in a body I was still learning to live in. None of that fits on a pink t-shirt. And none of it was cute.

I remember being on a dating app, having a conversation with someone who I was about to meet. I was out of town when we were texting and feeling like I needed to disclose I had no boobs. His text messages after where one big fat red flag. Anger that I didnt share before then being blocked. Cringe.

But somewhere in there, something else started happening. Because I'd been first and because I hadn't been quiet about it, people started finding me. Friends of friends. Someone's sister. A coworker. I became the person people came to when they or someone they loved, was going through it. I learned how to hold space for someone else's fear because I remembered exactly what mine felt like with nobody in the room who'd been there.

I learned compassion. I learned gratitude. I learned to be bold and say what's true even when it's inconvenient, because I'd already survived the thing that was supposed to scare me the most. I got more stamps in my passport because I finally understood that "someday" is not a plan. I got better at being a friend, because I wanted to give back even a fraction of what I'd been given.

Healers Are Angels

I think about the people who took care of me more than I think about the disease itself. A radiologist I ran into months later and got to properly thank, in front of his whole family at a drag show of all places. My hair stylist, who washed my hair when I physically couldn't do it myself. A physical therapist who worked to help me rebuilt my strength and keep lymphedema at bay. A functional medicine doctor who still helps me manage my estrogen levels today. An acupuncturist who helped healed my scars. A lymphatic drainage masseuse whose hugs remain, to this day, some of the best I have ever received in my life.

These people are proof that humans are extraordinary. I didn't expect cancer to teach me that. It did anyway.

My family, Who Didn't Sign Up For This

I remember calling my parents and telling them the news - I hated doing this to them. They flew back to Chicago and stayed with me as my diagnosis became an action plan and became a surgery date. My family sat for hours at Rush while they waited to hear how my surgery went. It was a long surgery as you can see below.

My mom stayed with me overnight in the hospital and later cried with me as she helped me shower for the first time after surgery. I looked in the mirror and saw my chest, with drains coming out the sides and stitches where my breasts once were, I needed my Mommy that day for sure. My dad did the grocery shopping and ran back and forth to the city and suburbs to keep his business moving and helping when he could. My sister became Jada’s keeper for the winter because I couldn't walk her. Even Jada knew something was different and became my emotional support animal.

Nobody in my family asked to become a cancer family. This on top of mourning our family friend Barb, who lost her fight to cancer at the end of December, they showed up through the first few hurdles of the physical part of my recovery and continue to do so every day.

The Mental Stuff Continues

If none of this had happened, if I hadn't been first, hadn't gone it alone, hadn't found these healers or leaned on this family, I don't think Find Her Compass would exist. I wouldn't have learned what I needed to learn to do my part in building it. Breast cancer changed my life in ways I genuinely cannot count and most of them had nothing to do with the disease itself and everything to do with what it forced out of me and the people around me.

So when a brand launches their pink version of their product or a sports team wears pink socks for a game and calls it awareness, I don't feel moved. I see the gap. The chasm is huge between the performative slogan and what this disease actually costs, and gives, and takes, and builds. "Save the boobies" can’t possibly do the work that’s needed to create awareness, hold space for those that experienced this trauma or celebrate the woman that arises beyond the disease.

This is why I don't do your pink.