It’s liberating and empowering to be able to express my asymmetry

ANNA VERSTEEG

After being diagnosed with breast cancer, I decided to have a mastectomy without reconstruction.

Mainly to keep medical intervention to a minimum, both in the short and the long term, but also because I needed time to process and accept my loss instead of immediately hiding behind the fantasy of a restored symmetry. It is an irreplaceable loss.

Over time it became liberating and empowering to be able to express my a-symmetry without feeling the need to fool the outside world into believing that nothing had happened.

It is wonderful to meet and connect with other women who are also happy to deviate from that perceived norm and embrace their asymmetry.

Since losing one, I developed a fascination for the breast fostered by a need to divert my narrative away from one of fear to one of agency and curiosity. I started reading, writing, interviewing, researching and collecting anything I could find related to the breast, culminating in the ‘Cabinet of Curiosities’ that defines my ‘bbookproject’ and related publication that I am writing.