What is it they say, when the going gets tough, the tough get going. I can’t write that phrase without thinking of Billy Ocean singing it and Michael Douglas appearing in the pop video and dancing badly in a white suit as a faux backing vocalist. There’s an in joke there, a superstar being a backing singer thing, a radical twist on celebrity. Can’t get the darn tune out of my head though now. Those videos really illustrate the mutual appreciation that exists between actors and pop stars, each one wants to be the other, similar in a way to rocks stars and fashion models. I knew I wanted to be famous but didn’t quite know what for kinda thing, could have gone either way, rock star, model or actor. Anyway that is a distraction from what I was trying to say which is that tough circumstances can sometimes show you a strength that you didn’t know you had, or didn’t recognise as a strength at all.
When the going got tough for me, particularly when I was diagnosed with breast cancer for a second time in 2011, I wasn’t going anywhere, tough or otherwise. I was too shocked. It was an abject lesson in wrestling with uncertainty. I was just coming up to the end of my first year as a fine art student and then had to prepare for a radical double mastectomy post a ‘routine’ check up. I was stoically grateful that the operation was going to happen during the summer holidays, that was a relief. Bizarre the things you think at times of high stress. Thank you cancer for reappearing at a convenient time for my education! Wow. In typical Eugenie style, I had made the decision that finally I was going to do something about expressing myself. I had been actively engaged in promoting other peoples musical output for quite some time but I was silent myself and had certainly forgotten what it was to be self expressed. So it was my turn and I felt thwarted and very sorry for myself. Not a cool thing to admit but the truth is the truth.
My educational whim had ended up with my securing a place to study Fine Art at Northbrook MET in West Sussex over five years. I had a bit of a post cancer identity crisis so I decided I needed to study art. I was going to make one phone call, to one art college and if that didn’t work it wasn’t meant to be. I made that one phone call to Northbrook and got one interview and was accepted and I was absolutely gobsmacked. The important thing about it was that I had in that moment committed to the idea that I might have a future beyond surviving cancer. I shot an arrow out into the unknown waters of a fragile future and somehow the ripples from that imagined future kept me going. A tide created by the dreamy drop in the ocean, when things really hurt the waves of possibility would lap against my feet and calm me. I can’t let this get me, I have to graduate and I was already a year in to my degree, so I had to finish.
That was a really fortunate thing. The unrelenting, trials and tribulations of cancer (that falling down an escalator backwards feeling), treatment and recovery (if you are one of the lucky ones) is deeply testing. Having an alternative creative focus was such a relief and a release. To experience my vulnerability as a creative experience was an unexpected gift. I didn’t realise that the untapped power of my imagination, my sense of the ridiculous and just the sheer fun of seeing things differently, would be so critical to my survival. When the future is unclear allowing yourself to just imagine a different outcome, one that isn’t the worst case scenario is sometimes enough.
*This blog is written to support #Breast Cancer Awareness Month (October 2018) and The Breast Cancer Haven who helped me beat beast cancer in 2008 and in 2011 – along with the incredible team on Worthing Hospital’s Breast Cancer Ward, UK. I am SO blessed to be well and cancer free today.
Donate to the Breast Cancer Haven Here
Eugenie Arrowsmith 