Samantha Paige: Radical Decisions and Reclaiming Identity.
Good Life Project
Jonathan Fields / Acast
4.5 • 3.4K Ratings
🗓️ 22 January 2018
⏱️ 66 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
What would you do to live your truth?
Samantha Paige is an artist, parent, philanthropist, and the founder of the Last Cut Project – but you most likely know her from Equinox’s “Commit to Something” campaign.
She’s a thyroid cancer survivor and BRCA1 previvor, but she’s a symbol of strength for so much more than that.
Samantha was subjected to a series of uncomfortable decisions throughout her life, but after a double mastectomy and an implant surgery that continued to make her sick for months, she found herself faced with surprisingly, her most life-changing decision of all: to remove the silicone implants.
Directly after her surgery, Samantha’s life took a turn, she looked around and realized that she didn’t even recognize her surroundings. As soon as Samantha made that initial decision to remove her implants, she found herself. She found truth and freedom, and was finally able to live a life that feels like hers, but with that came an internal battle to accept her new body.
Over the years, this struggle has forced her to take a long, hard look at disease and prejudice in society. She asked herself why she felt self-conscious without her breasts, and ultimately, set out on a mission to change this status quo by formulating different conversation around these topics. This inflection point led her to launch the Last Cut photo project, social movement, and podcast (“Last Cut Conversations”) which has helped encourage others to seek freedom by honoring similar decisions, their individuality, and a life that feels uniquely right to them. Now, she creates community around these conversations and allows others a place to share without shame.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I hadn't processed the trauma. I didn't know how to process the trauma and it would take |
| 0:07.1 | many years to figure that out. But it was creeping out in my body in other ways because in my |
| 0:14.3 | experiences the truth lives in our bodies and we can try and run away from that. When |
| 0:19.9 | we don't process it but at some point it comes back to bite you. |
| 0:28.1 | So when this week's guests in the page walked into a gynecologist office when she was 21 |
| 0:33.6 | years old she did not expect to walk out having a potential diagnosis of thyroid cancer. |
| 0:39.8 | But that in fact ended up being her reality. She went through successful treatment but the |
| 0:44.4 | trauma remained embedded in both her physical body and her psyche for many years. She reflected |
| 0:49.4 | on her own diagnosis and then her mother's diagnosis of breast cancer when Samantha was |
| 0:55.5 | very young and decided that she would eventually get tested for what's become known as the |
| 0:59.5 | Brocka gene. She tested positive and as a new mom made a decision to have a double mastectomy |
| 1:06.7 | and then reconstructive surgery. A couple of years down the road from there she also then made |
| 1:11.8 | the decision to reverse the reconstructive surgery and have implantally moved. She documented this |
| 1:17.1 | entire process in something called last cut project where she and her friend Lisa created this powerful |
| 1:24.2 | visual photodocumentary and shared it with the world. You can actually find that we'll link to the |
| 1:28.9 | Instagram account and launched a podcast series to share similar conversations about people processing |
| 1:35.9 | their own identity and redefining it and stepping into a place of power and agency and defying very |
| 1:41.3 | often cultural norms that podcast by the way is called final cut conversations. She kind of exploded |
| 1:48.3 | in a much bigger way into the public consciousness when equinox featured her in a massive international |
| 1:55.0 | ad campaign and showed a picture of her as redefining what we see as beauty and power and strength |
| 2:04.3 | and identity and that led her to literally walk out her door and see massive billboards with her |
| 2:11.2 | on it and it led to a bigger public conversation about all of these ideas. So I wanted to sit down |
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