Krysta Rodriguez pens powerful essay on breast cancer, womanhood

Krysta Rodriguez, a Broadway actress and current star on NBC’s Trial & Error, has opened up about her struggles with breast cancer in a powerful, emotionally charged essay for Lenny Letter.

“I have been grappling with the question of what makes a woman since being diagnosed with breast cancer two years ago, at age 30,” she writes. “I was born biologically female and my body progressed in that way for decades, never veering from the textbook. Puberty, estrogen, breasts, a period, you name it, if it was a trait of a ‘woman,’ I had it. Then, suddenly, a rogue cell.”

Rodriguez recounted her survival story in Cosmopolitan and The New York Post, but here she unpacks how cancer attacked her identity as a woman.

She recalls how her chemotherapy treatments brought up questions like, “Do you want children? Maybe? You must start fertility treatments this week. Got anyone to father it? No? Here’s a pamphlet of sperm donors. Oh and, by the way, it’s possible that because you couldn’t establish your career, find the perfect man, and procreate in the time allowed for ‘woman,’ you just left yourself wide open to cancer. You see, there are some studies that support the idea that the childless are at a higher risk for breast cancer. Add that to a historic trait of womanhood: shame.”

At 32, Rodriguez recounts how she survived cancer with few of these physical female attributes: “No breasts, no hair, no estrogen, no functional ovaries, no pheromones, no libido, no skinny jeans, no milk ducts, no supple erogenous zones, no self-lubrication, no period.” But the process helped redefine her concept of “woman.”

“I did whatever it took,” the former Smash star writes. “I fought harder for my health than I had ever imagined I would have to. I advocated for myself when my opinions were marginalized. I wrestled with the tough questions life gives you and even wrestled life itself. I’m a strong Woman who is expanding the definition every day, and I have my own list of criteria.”

She concludes, “A woman chooses. A woman persists. A woman resists. A woman asks questions. A woman has scars. A woman feels sensual in her own time and way. A woman has stories. A woman speaks up. A woman loves. A woman survives. What’s your list?”

Read Rodriguez’s full essay in the latest Lenny Letter newsletter.