Hellooooo,
Happy New Year! May your dreams come true, may your goals be achieved, may your health be at its best and, above all, may you be happy.
Don’t forget to cherish every little moment of your life.
To start this new year in style, I have prepared for you, aninterview with the amazing founder of GENETICANCER: Laëtitia Mendes.
Laëtitia is such an awesome woman! She is adorable, kind, funny, beautiful and sweet.
She is an image consultant and founded her own image and communication agency “Charism”. As I mentioned before, she also founded GENETICANCER which is dedicated to the fight against genetic and/or hereditary cancers.
I feel very honoured that she has given us some of her time to answer these questions.
I hope that this amazing woman will move you as much as she has moved me.
Don’t hesitate to follow her (@laetitia_mendes), GENETICANCER (@geneticancer) and CHARISM (@agencecharism) on Insta.
I hope you enjoy her interview!
Happy reading!
– Kat.
K: You underwent a double ablation because you were a BRCA carrier like your mother before you. You then decided to talk about the fight you were facing following Angelina Jolie’s speech about her double mastectomy at the Cannes Film Festival on June 14, 2013. Do you think you would have talked about it if Angelina hadn’t?
Letitia: No, never. I would never have talked about it for the simple reason that the subject was really very unknown in France. She led the biggest prevention and information campaign with her ad. It was therefore much easier for me to say “I had this intervention like Angelina” rather than going into details as she had to do via her platform and explain and justify her choice. I think it’s already loaded enough with meaning as it is. I couldn’t have managed to take the lead without a public figure who could get out of it. I’m sure, today, I would still be in my lair. I might have made progress in my family, but I would not have had the same role and I would probably not have taken up the torch as I did then.
It also gave me more strength to tell myself that I’m not alone and it’s going to be much easier for me to be the French relay because obviously, Angelina being untouchable, I even had questions where I said to myself “ah there, I’d love to take my phone and call her and ask her questions to know how it went for her”. I told myself that other people are going to want to do it and, for sure, there won’t be Angelina to answer, so I might as well be the one who can perhaps guide the path of these different women and these different families.
K: You wrote a book “My Little Gene, My Second Chance” to tell your story. Has writing been liberating for you? What was the process behind it?
Letitia: It was more than liberating. I think it was really therapeutic. It wasn’t easy to put into words what I’d been through. I had difficulty expressing myself orally, so I thought it might be easier for me to find a way to express myself in writing. And it’s true that, as I wrote more and more lines about my family history, about everything I’d already overcome, I really realized that I had already started to build up a little bit of resilience.
Writing has really allowed me to get through this and to finish calming myself down and, above all, to help me digest this decision making process that had been very difficult. So, as well as the press, there was the physical side, there was the fact of being very self-conscious about the result of my new breasts, I really needed, I think, like in a diary, to make my confessions… It helped me with my head and my morale.
I encourage women or different people who may be in very difficult situations to try to write. It’s really an outlet and it allows you to realize how far you’ve come, how much you’ve already done to get there and express your emotions. There are some things that are difficult to express through the voice and that’s easier, in the end, to put into words. My sister, she found a way to do it, a little speechless and wordless, by dancing: it’s yet another form of expression. I think that in therapy in general, in order to be able to move forward, you really need to materialize it. It’s true that writing has allowed me to make it public and universal: a bit like an act of peace and security.
K: You founded the image and communication consulting agency “Charism” in 2011 following your breast reconstruction. Did this change of career orientation sound like a natural progression for a personal reconstruction?
Letitia: Yes, because I was my own guinea pig. During the training I thought, “Well, what can I do except go to a shrink, when I hate myself and I can’t put my clothes on without feeling disgusted in the mirror.”
It was complicated because no one could see it, but I had the impression that everyone could only see my damaged breasts through clothes.
I think it’s a bit of a syndrome for people going through similar periods. I also had to mourn my old breasts because they used to be very beautiful. Even though I didn’t like it and I knew it was a danger to me, I felt that I was no longer attractive, that I was no longer feminine at all and I had a real rejection of my ownimage. So, yeah, I thought, well, there’s got to be some people that are working on it, and if I can make a living out of it, that’sgreat. If I can figure out how I’m going to get out of this, then I can help other people.
During the 6 months of training, every day I felt like I was getting better and better. To understand how to use fashion as a weapon, which was also going to be able to protect me in an outer shell that was going to make me stronger and to be able to find myself pretty, to please myself, before I could please others. It’s been a real day’s work. Thanks to the training, thanks to the tools of image consulting, I was really able to find my identity. I felt prettier and prettier every day. And even if nobody knew it in the training, I felt like I had something to offer, something more, precisely that was hidden and that I could shelter, but which was my inner strength and which made me beautiful through what I had experienced.
It wasn’t easy every day. Little by little, I swapped the turtleneck for slightly more cheerful tops, with colours, with shapes, to attract attention in a different way but above all to regain my cheerfulness. I chose clothes that suited me better, with cuts and shapes that also allowed me to cheat more. It was great because I started to feel better in my body and in my head. That’s the beauty of it: it’s being comfortable in your own skin and being able to find the kind of clothes that say what you want to say. It was a victory. Thanks to this training, I also understood how rewarding and useful this job was. It’s not just working on something that can seem almost superficial. You can do very deep things with image and style consulting: finding your own look, being able to assert yourself, looking good in pictures and it’s really a big big big job on me. I managed to do this work thanks to all of these hurdles.
K: You created the association GENETICANCER dedicated to the fight against genetic and/or hereditary cancers. In concrete terms, what does GENETICANCER do?
Letitia: In concrete terms, the association is a patient association. We bring together all families at risk who may be predisposed to different types of cancer, and not only breast or ovarian cancer. It’s really all types of cancers.
It is the first platform in France dedicated to these families. It is therefore the voice of the families that is represented by the association via women who, like me, have had different types of experiences, who have gone through genetic testing, who are carriers of a genetic mutation and who, at some point in their lives, have wanted to make their life experience a support.
Today, we do a lot of prevention, we provide information, we hold a lot of discussion groups. We also create supports such as brochures. We also have a website where you can ask questions and get in touch with families who are concerned about cancer. We also provide care and support when needed to accompany families through the genetic testing procedure or after, possibly, preventive surgery to avoid developing and increasing this risk.
There are about fifty ambassadors in France covering the whole of France. There are also a lot of volunteers and members who are there to keep the association alive since we do a lot of fundraising. Thanks to the funds that we collect every year, the gala dinners, the sale of teddy bears, etc., we also manage to finance research programs and researchers
in France to find new treatments and to be able to continue to reduce cancers, particularly hereditary cancers.
K: What is the difference between a genetic cancer and a hereditary cancer?
Letitia: There is not much difference. Genetic is when there is a predisposition in the family for the gene. Hereditary, is when it’spassed down through different branches of the family. It’s the same thing, but there’s still a little peculiarity in the nuance of the gene.
K: In 2017 and 2018, you held the magnificent GENETICANCER galas where some crazy work was done behind the scenes to make it happen. What emotions do you feel when the project comes to fruition? Will there be a 3rd edition in 2019?
Letitia: Yes, of course, there will be a third edition because it is a real success in the sense that the association and its actions have been talked about by the general public in the tabloids and other media. It is very important for me because we target very young people: we know that it is important that the message is delivered to everyone because the particularity of these cancers is to reach younger and younger people. Of course, apart from doctors, hospitals and perhaps even people who are affected by cancer at a later age, we really want a very active community. The gala is a success because we feel young, invested, active people. Thanks to our godmother, we also succeeded in mobilizing people and therefore public figures who agreed to help us in this prevention campaign. It’s a great first because it’s always difficult to convince people, especially when they’re personalities who haven’t been directly affected by these genes: touched by the cause of cancer, they wanted to help us with our message and to help these growing families.
For me, there is, above all, a great emotion and satisfaction for the association to succeed in collecting, gathering and federating all these people around our project. There is also a very intense emotion around the celebration of life and to make the gala a festive and joyful event and not something sad. It also feels good, I think, for people who have gone through complicated, difficult, delicate, painful moments, who have had a lot of grief because often death was also there very early in their family. Understanding that it’s really great when you’re alive and have your full potential. To be able to celebrate, to be able to mobilize people, to raise money and funds and to finally feel much stronger even though you are different. It really gives us other advantages of strength.
The 3 emotions are satisfaction, joy and the pleasure of being together.
It’s also the strength of life and character of all these people who are very involved, who are also sometimes people who follow us, who are sick and who can’t always participate in the gala, but who, from a distance, find that it’s great for them, and that it gives a lot of hope.
So yes, obviously, a big YES for a 3rd edition and I hope even more spectacular.
K: In this new year that is beginning, do you have any projects in preparation and what can you tell us about them?
Letitia: There is a big big big big project since we won the PFIZER prize at the end of the year. It’s a great scientific prize that helps raise additional funds.
In fact, in addition to the brochures, our project was to create multi-lingual videos because there are a lot of people, even in France, who don’t speak French. So, it’s very complicated for them to access the information in our brochures and simply read these materials. We’re going to create short videos that will be available and downloadable from our website: they will explain, in comic book form, why it’s important to get tested and, above all, how you can raise awareness among family members when you know that there have been several cases of repeated cancers in one and the same branch. For us, this is a really big project because, at this time, with multimedia and interactive software, we know that videos reach a lot of people.
We hope, thanks to our relays, thanks to the hospitals and cancer centers that work with us, that it will be even easier to distribute them and, no doubt, less expensive than printing all these brochures. There is going to be a lot of preparation work in 3D, because we’re probably going to make a little cartoon. This project is going to take us a lot of time in addition to the preparation of the gala. There are also events that we continue to hold in the shopping centers with a weekend full of people during National Cancer Week. We are going to renew this operation with welcome stands, various activities and a small showcase. It will be mainly in Paris because, for the moment, the volunteers are concentrated in the Paris region. So, it’s easier to organise events of this scale in Paris. There will also be several conferences in Dijon, Toulouse or Lyon in which I will participate.
These are really the 3 big highlights of 2019: the multilingual videos, the event in the shopping mall during the National Week of the Fight Against Cancer in March and the gala that will still take place in mid-November.
K: What can we wish you in 2019?
Letitia: May we save as many people as possible! Unfortunately, we lost another exceptional woman this week. I think the most important thing is that we move fast. And that we can succeed in continuing to carry out our actions as we do with great modesty and humility. And above all, above all, that today’s populationcommit themselves to our side, that we have more volunteers, more donations and that generosity is at the heart of the actions of the French, the Belgians, of all these people who, for us, have a lot of opportunities. It is true that solidarity is also what saves us.
So here we are, to be able to save as many people as possible so that we can continue our fight, that would already be a very great dream.
K: And finally, what are the three words that best describe you?
Letitia: Me, personally? Wow, that’s going to be the hardest question.
So, the words that best describe me… perseverance… the sun, because for me, it’s an essentialelement of life. I think it’s very important to have that sunny side, to always take life on the right side. And… positivism, to always be positive as much as possible.
K: Thank you very much, Laëtitia!
I hope you enjoyed the interview. Don’t hesitate to leave a comment and share it with your friends 🙂
On the GENETICANCER website (geneticancer.org), you can buy the book “My little gene, my second chance”, a super teddy “Mr/Mrs Sans Gène”, or a nice tote bag (any profit goes to the association’s activities). You can also read the brochures and ask questions directly to GENETEAM if you have any 🙂
Don’t forget to go and subscribe to Laëtitia on Instagram hihi! (@laetitia_mendes / @geneticancer)
Lots of love,
–Kat.
-ITW from January 24th 2018