Meet Nikki Mitchell - you can follow her @nymitchell11

Shame is crippling. Shame is fear. Shame is believing that you are flawed and unworthy. Shame has no place here. Meet @nymitchell11 an incredible Breastie opening up about overcoming shame and the power of owning your story. This is her story…

After my BRCA1 diagnosis in March 2018 and deciding to have a preventive bilateral mastectomy 4 months later, I spent the entire time leading up to my surgery and 2 months afterward living in shame. I'm a generally conservative person, as are a lot of my friends, and I felt like talking about boobs was taboo. To me, my boobs were an intimate and sexual part of my body. Talking about having surgery to remove them and plastic surgery to reconstruct them made me extremely uncomfortable and I pretty much avoided it entirely. I felt immoral and unworthy. I kept everything as secret as I could. The problem was that I had a 1 and 2 year old at the time of my surgery. Therefore, my husband and I were going to need a lot of help during my recovery. For this reason and this reason alone, I opened up to the pastors at our church about what was going on and slowly to friends and family so that we would have help with our kids while I was healing.

Then, one day while waiting in an exam room at my plastic surgeon's office, I noticed a picture hanging on the wall. It was of a woman who called herself a previvor for having a preventative bilateral mastectomy. There was a link to a website on the bottom. I typed it into my phone and, over the next few days, found an entire community of previvors just like me. After reading these women's stories and talking to some of them, my heart began to change from a place of isolation and shame to a place of empowerment and freedom. When I finally shared my story publicly, I literally felt the weight removed from my shoulders. I felt such joy and freedom and gratefulness for who I am and for who God made me to be. See the thing about shame is it loses its power when it is spoken. It grows and festers when we stay silent, but as soon as we own our stories and share our fight, shame has no place 🙌🏻✨