here’s a saying my grandmother liked to use: little girls should be seen and not heard. I internalised that idea for much of my life, but when I was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2020, something changed.took a great deal from me, but it gave me back my voice, and now I don’t think I’ll ever be silent again.
At school I was labelled “dogmatic” by a teacher who liked to stare down my blouse during lessons. When I called him out, I acquired the additional label of “troublemaker”. And so I grew up believing that silence was a virtue. I became self-conscious about my voice and its effect on others. I was already more than self-conscious about the effect my appearance had on others, and did my best to mitigate this by hiding behind a curtain of hair.
on the internet are often commented upon, told their experiences don’t count. When they push back, they receive abuse. For someone like me, raised on keeping the peace, it was sometimes tempting simply not to engage. Suddenly there was more to life than worrying about optics. So what if I didn’t look as people expected me to? So what if I expressed a view that made someone else despise me? I realised that I had been hiding away – under my hair, under my fear of upsetting people – all my life. Now, in the face of cancer, I felt I’d rediscovered myself. Acknowledging the effects, the– felt like a superpower. My scale of priorities had shifted. The dreadful thing had already happened.