Andrea Congas, Relief with Grief (PEOPLE & PORTRAIT 2026)

There’s a particular kind of grief that comes with losing parts of yourself that nobody else can see. Adenomyosis. Fibroids. Deep infiltrating endometriosis. Years of pain that gets minimised. Explained away. Normalised. Pain so constant you almost forget what existing without it feels like. But the surgery itself is its own kind of wound. Not just physical - though there is that too. The bruising. The scars. The exhaustion. The body learning itself all over again. And somehow, those five small scars almost feel like an insult. Because they don’t truly reflect the real scarring. They don’t show the years lost to pain. The fear. The exhaustion. The way chronic illness slowly reshapes your relationship with your own body. For some women, a hysterectomy is relief. For others, it is also grief. Grief for the children they once imagined. Grief for the choice that no longer exists. Grief for the version of womanhood they thought they would carry forever. There is something deeply confronting about surviving a surgery that saves you from pain… while also mourning what it took with it. And yet somehow, in the middle of all of that loss, there is survival too. A body that fought hard for years. A body that carried pain quietly. A body learning how to heal. These scars are not weakness. They are evidence that something painful was endured - and survived.

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