Eva's wish to see her favorite music artist in concert

I’m Eva, and I was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma in February of 2024, and began a rotation of twelve rounds of chemotherapy that extended over the course of the next seven months. The most difficult part about my experience wasn’t the diagnosis itself or the effects of chemotherapy, it was the feeling of losing my girlhood.

The process of chemotherapy took away the core attributes of what I believed girlhood to be: luscious hair, sun-kissed skin, and the lack of foreign chemicals and devices in your body. The first day I received chemotherapy I had my port placed, and chemicals that read “hazardous” on their labels were pushed by kind nurses into my bloodstream: strike one. A week after that, I opened my photos app to snap a picture of a mural I saw that read “Life is so beautiful. Life is so hard.” My camera was automatically in selfie mode upon opening the app. I continued to flip the camera to snap the photo of the all-too-pertinent mural, but not before seeing the ghastly figure staring back at me hauntingly from the semi-cracked screen. Strike two. My ninth session of chemotherapy marked the dawn of July, and the sunset of my perceived girlhood. I wish I could say I pulled out my last strand of withering dyed hair, but truthfully it fell out all on its own. Third strike, 4:30pm, July 5, 2024.

But, at some point between when the first peach fuzz sprouted from my head and when I got on that plane to Indianapolis, I realized that girlhood is so much more than what you look like or the life-threatening illness you were diagnosed with at sixteen. Girlhood is listening to Love Story on my way to the first day of third grade, and blaring Mine from the speakers of my dad’s old trailblazer after my elementary school graduation. It’s hearing Blank Space at a middle school dance, and sobbing to the sound of Never Grow Up after getting dropped off at high school for the first time. Girlhood is You’re Own Your Own Kid in my airpods on my walk to APUSH, and listening to Soon You’ll Get Better sitting paralyzed in the parking garage of the Hospital. It’s listening exclusively to The Tortured Poets Department Album every time I got chemotherapy. It’s pressing play on that black and dreary album cover every other week for seven months, until I rang the bell in August. It’s the phone call that I got from my Make-A-Wish friends telling me I was headed to Indianapolis in November. Girlhood is hearing my a favorite music artist live on a stage, cancer-free, singing the songs that raised me.

In July 2024, I thought my girlhood was gone forever. But in November of 2024, Make-A-Wish helped me realize that girlhood isn't something you lose. It's something you carry with you, even through the darkest days, until one day you're finally well enough to hear it sung back to you