Your Stories - Mandi

Content Warning: These stories contain mentions of body dysmorphia, body image struggles, pregnancy loss, fertility struggles and gendered violence. If you find any of the below triggering, please find a list of helpful and free resources below:

DV/SV: 1800 RESPECT

Mental Health: https://www.beyondblue.org.au/

Eating Disorders and Body Image Issues: Butterfly Foundation 1800 ED HOPE

Mandi’s story has layers, trauma, gallows humour, honesty, grit. She’s not after a redemption arc, she’s a woman who’s seen some sh*t and is still game enough to stand in front of a camera. Mandi has this rare kind of humour that sneaks up on you, sharp, self-aware, the sort that comes from having survived things that would flatten most people. She says her body’s “been through a lot,” which might be the understatement of the century.

At six years old she lost her right eye to cancer. Growing up with a prosthetic meant learning early how cruel people can be about difference. Eye contact was complicated. Mirrors were complicated. Being “looked at” was always loaded. Years later, when she finally started feeling strong and at home in her body, life threw her another curveball: a ruptured aneurysm that nearly killed her. Emergency surgery. A scar that runs from her chest to her pubic bone, an uninvited reminder carved right down the centre of her.

It’s wild how quickly the world tells women like Mandi that their bodies are “too much.” Too scarred, too soft, too real. She’s seen how beauty gets edited, the perfect symmetry, the airbrushed eyes, the headless fat bodies used as BTS on the news. Meanwhile she’s standing there, alive, with one prosthetic eye and a body that’s literally fought for her life.

When she came in, she was nervous in that brutally honest way: wondering if she’d shaved properly, if her underwear was good enough, if she’d regret it halfway through. But the robe, the makeup, the prosecco, the laughter, it all built this slow comfort. The kind where she stopped worrying about how her body “should” look and started letting it just be hers.

Her photos floored her. “They’re amazing,” she said, “and they look like me.” That’s the part that gets us. The “me” in that sentence. She didn’t see someone different, she saw someone who looks like her and she loved what she saw. 

The irony? The photos she loved most were the fully nude ones, the ones that stripped away every bit of armour and expectation. We WISH we could share what she chose for her print (I might sneak it in with some censoringat the end), it’s utterly spectacular and the most heavenly work of art. 

Mandi, you’re bold, wickedly funny, scarred in all the right ways, and very much alive. And that, in itself, is a masterpiece.