By: Octavio Pasini Bonfanti, 33, Testicular Cancer

I didn’t plan to wear that hat again. It wasn’t a symbolic decision or a brave one. It was just cold. I opened a drawer without thinking, reached inside, and pulled out the beanie I used to wear during chemotherapy. I put it on automatically. And then I stopped.

For a moment, everything slowed down. I was standing in my room, hands still, suddenly aware of my breathing, my heartbeat, the weight of the fabric on my head. I had spent months believing that if I ever touched that hat again, it would send me right back to treatment rooms and bad news and fear. So when my chemo ended, I folded it carefully and hid it away. I told myself that moving forward meant leaving certain things behind.

But there I was, wearing it.

The first thing that surprised me was the smell. It didn’t smell like hospitals or antiseptic. It smelled like me. That’s when memories started showing up—not in order, not politely, just all at once. Not as dates or medical terms, but as feelings. My first diagnosis in 2021 surfaced as a tightness in my chest. The shock of hearing the word cancer for the first time. Surgery. The moment I realized that being young doesn’t make you immune. Back then, I thought cancer was something you went through once. I thought surviving meant it was over.

Standing there with that hat on, I remembered how quickly that belief fell apart. The relapse in 2023 came back next. Not as a headline moment, but as a sense of exhaustion I still recognize. Hearing that the cancer was back. Again. Radiotherapy. The slow, heavy tiredness that settles into your body. The strange feeling of being told you’re “doing great” while your life keeps getting interrupted. I remembered how lonely it felt to explain to people that no, this wasn’t just a small setback, and no, I wasn’t done dealing with it yet.

Then came 2024. The word metastatic. I didn’t think about it in sentences—I felt it in my stomach. That was the year I wore this hat almost every day. Salvage chemotherapy. Days that blurred together. Learning how much your body can handle when you don’t really get a choice. The version of me that existed then lived inside that hat too. The version focused only on getting through the next hour, the next appointment, the next side effect.

All of that was there, resting on my head, in a moment that looked completely ordinary from the outside.

What didn’t happen mattered just as much as what did. I didn’t panic. I didn’t cry. I didn’t feel like I needed to take it off right away. Instead, I stood there and breathed. The hat wasn’t pulling me backward. It wasn’t reopening something I couldn’t handle. It was just there. And so was I. That’s when it hit me: healing isn’t about pretending these things didn’t happen. It’s not about distancing yourself from every reminder. Life after cancer—especially as an AYA—is about figuring out how to live with what you’ve been through without letting it run your life.

No one really prepares you for that part. People talk about fighting and being strong and staying positive, but they don’t talk enough about the quiet moments after treatment ends, when there’s no clear roadmap for how to be a person again. Wearing that hat again made me face who I am now. Not who I was before cancer, and not only who I was during treatment, but who I’ve become after surgeries, relapses, radiation, and chemo. My body feels different. Time feels different. The way I think about the future is different. But none of that means I’m broken. It just means I’m changed.

That morning wasn’t important in any obvious way. There were no doctors, no scans, no test results. No one else saw it happen. But it was one of the most honest moments of my entire cancer experience. A moment where the past and the present existed together without fighting each other.

I didn’t take the hat off right away. I went on with my morning wearing it, noticing how normal it felt. When I finally took it off, I didn’t hide it again. I folded it and left it somewhere I could see it. Not as a reminder of suffering, but as proof that surviving cancer doesn’t mean erasing parts of your story.

Life after cancer isn’t about going back to who you were. It’s about rebuilding something new with everything you carry now. That morning, putting on that hat, I wasn’t being dramatic or brave. I was just learning how to live with my own history. If you’re an AYA reading this and you’re somewhere in the middle of it—treatment, remission, relapse, or the confusing space after—know this: you don’t have to leave parts of yourself behind to move forward. You’re allowed to carry them with you, at your own pace.

With love, from northern Argentina,

Octavio