In 2013, Angelina Jolie had a double mastectomy, leaving her with “scars” which she says represent her life.
In an interview with French Inter, she explains, “Well, I’ve always been someone more interested in the scars and the life that people carry.”
The Wanted actress further explains her philosophy on her scars, stating, “I’m not drawn to some perfect idea of a life that has no scars. So no, I think, hey, you know, I see my scars are a choice I made to do what I could do to stay here as long as I could with my children.’
She continues, “I love my scars because of that, you know, and I’m grateful that I had the opportunity to have the choice to do something proactive about my health. I lost my mom when I was young, and I’m raising my children without a grandmother.”
Jolie, in the end, concludes that it is important to make mistakes to learn from them, because if one hasn’t, they did not live their lives to the fullest.
“So for me, no, I think this is life. And if you get to the end of your life and you haven’t made [a big, you know], you haven’t made mistakes, you haven’t made a mess, you don’t have scars, you haven’t lived a full enough life, I think.”
Mastectomy is a surgery that involves removing breast tissue to combat breast cancer.
In 2013, Jolie explained that after her mother, Marcheline Bertrand, was diagnosed with cancer, doctors told her she had the “faulty gene,” BRCA1, a symptom that increases her chances of having breast cancer.
“I wanted to write this to tell other women that the decision to have a mastectomy was not easy,” the actress wrote in New York Times op-ed My Medical Choice.
“But it is one I am very happy that I made. 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.”
In addition, Jolie also had her ovaries and fallopian tubes removed as a measure to prevent developing ovarian cancer in 2015.
