Éva Szentesi was the latest guest of our series “Now I’m Coming”. In this article, we have highlighted some ideas in text form from the nearly one and a half hour conversation.
Éva Szentesi has been drawing since kindergarten and writing since the age of nine, when she wrote down her first novel, a horror story entitled Witch in the Mist. He also designed the cover for it, and he still remembers one or two catchy phrases from the experimental text. The high school years meant true creativity for him, the set design he studied at the Nyíregyházi Art Center:
“I remember that at the open day, Ágnes Gyarmathy told me about set design, and I was very impressed when she told me about the theater world. It was a five-year course, where we always spent three days studying traditional subjects, and two days we could devote entirely to creativity. After vocational high school, I wasn’t accepted to the University of Fine Arts, and then I didn’t even try again, because writing came to my life instinctively.”
For Szentesi, writing books is his complete joy, and he likes to do this mostly in the morning. The former WMN journalist felt the tight pace of the online magazine was burdensome:
“I felt it was a compromise to write in order to get clicks. I was really tired of being so exposed to offensive comments with an opinion piece or a personal story at a widely read online magazine that I had to consider whether it was worth it for me to be annoyed by hurtful comments. With my personal blog, I feel much better now, I have a medium, and I write there when I have something real to say. It’s a different kind of audience, it made me a lot more relaxed.”
The writer was born in Tiszalök, and to this day, rural life with his fairytale childhood is an important area of nutrition for him. He considered moving back one day, because it is good for him to break away from the fast-paced lifestyle in Budapest.
Yes, this is what happens to a female body
His personal stories inspired his book, A mai naphoz no melemeim, which was published in May. Its main character is a woman who has undergone several operations and describes the physical and mental traumas of the healing process, as well as the processing of her relationship with her parents. Szentesi has already beaten cancer twice, the first time in 2013, when she was 28 years old, she was diagnosed with cervical cancer. With the book, he wanted to close the cancer chapter in his life, but not long after the publication of the book, the disease recurred. This is how he told about why it is important for him to write openly about cancer:
“Somehow, when I was misdiagnosed for several months in December 2013, I felt that I was extremely angry. I was angry that how could it not occur to me that I could be sick, why did the doctor say that I couldn’t be sick at such a young age. The first writings were driven by anger that now you really can’t find anything about it”?
His new volume is a semi-fictional, literary text into which I “condensed the agony of the past ten years. I didn’t even write a lot of things in it, because I thought that the reader wouldn’t even believe it. The fact that pain is depicted in such a natural way in the book is meant to show that yes, this is what happens to a woman’s body.
And there are so many things for a woman to be ashamed of, she doesn’t even have to go through that, just getting old is enough. You can be ashamed of whether you are wrinkled or fat, the world simply suggests that a woman should be ashamed of many things. We have far less material on cervical cancer than we should have.”
Szentesi writes in detail on his social media pages and his personal blog about how he experienced chemotherapy and the mental difficulties associated with it. This open honesty made people love the writer when he was fighting for his life:
“People love me much more when I’m sick and fighting for my life. I came a long way until I realized that I can’t be sick so that more people will love me. This is a very dangerous condition, because I don’t know how cancer develops, I don’t know how the mental processes of it take place. I can’t deny that it’s a huge pain for me if they don’t love me, I really need love, somehow it’s my life.”
You have to face the symptoms
She really wanted to break away from being the girl with cancer, but since the disease came back, she said to herself that “maybe this is my path, to write about it, to speak, to give lectures, because a lot of people are connected to it.” The writer also thinks that although the world has changed a lot in the last twenty years, cancer is still fundamentally a taboo subject that needs to be talked about a lot.
During the conversation, Szentesi also emphasized that early detection is important in the case of the disease, which is why you have to go for screening regularly, dare to ask the doctor, and it is also important to be able to go to another doctor if you don’t feel well somewhere. According to him, the state of healthcare is “more catastrophic than ten years ago” because the specialists have left. “Those who have remained in the health sector are the extremely dedicated handful of workers, they deserve all the respect”.
According to him, an important aspect in the early detection of diseases – for both women and men – is “whether we dare to face it if we have any symptoms. I know a lot of people who say that I don’t dare go to the doctor, lest something be found out. We can say that this is a general problem”.
“Obviously, it’s not about victim blaming, what can you do about it if you get cancer, but it’s really up to you to go for screening and monitor your body,” he said.
It is also difficult for the relative
He will probably receive very strong chemotherapy treatment again, in connection with which he thinks it is important to talk about the effect this has on the relatives.
“There is the environment that has to go through all of this with you, and I don’t think it’s any less difficult when someone lives there with a cancer patient undergoing such serious treatment.”
His partner told him now that he needs a plan, write down what turns him off and what makes him happy, and also write down what annoys him and makes him feel bad.
In the few weeks after his last operation, he was very under himself, and he thinks that it is important for someone in such a situation to allow himself that “yes, it is worth being very bad mentally and it is worth feeling sorry for yourself”.
“I play with the idea of death many times, there isn’t a day that doesn’t come to my mind.
I use to joke about death to my partner and friends, but I have a hard time with it myself”.
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