The Real Lesson from Angelina Jolie
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Even perceived super-humans in our society are ultimately human
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This week Angelina Jolie disclosed that she had a preventive double mastectomy after learning she carried a gene that made it extremely likely she would get breast cancer. She wrote in an op-ed in The New York Times that between early February and late April she completed three months of surgical procedures to remove both breasts.
“I wanted to write this to tell other women that the decision to have a mastectomy was not easy. But it is one I am very happy that I made,” Jolie writes. “My chances of developing breast cancer have dropped from 87 percent to under 5 percent. I can tell my children that they don’t need to fear they will lose me to breast cancer.”
Jolie’s mother died in January 2007 of breast cancer.
The bigger and perhaps more startling reality check this week was that as deified as they may be, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have not been handed perfect lives and are human like the rest of us
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Ms. Jolie provided a valuable reminder to us that breast cancer is a pervasive and deadly problem that both women and men face. Her approach to such and disclosure about it will likely save quite a few lives as it will embolden others to get screenings and take whatever action, no matter how radical, needs to be taken.
But perhaps a larger and more timeless lesson is that, in the end, we are all human and face much of the same challenges as everyone else, even those who are wildly successful celebrities with seemingly fairy-tale lives, like Mr. Pitt and Ms. Jolie. Whether it be heartbreak, loss of a loved one or sickness and potential death as in Ms. Jolie’s case, few if any of us are exempt from such requisites of being human.
This is probably the best possible takeaway from Ms. Jolie’s disclosure and should help us get through those difficult times when the weight of the world is on our shoulders and we wrongly think that there are others around us who don’t have any problems at all.
-I.M. Windee
