AfterThoughts: The Teenage Years
Every day, seven young people aged 13-24 hear the words “you have cancer”. This is a podcast that tells the rich and diverse stories of those young people.
About AfterThoughts
AfterThoughts: The Teenage Years is the new strand of the AfterThoughts podcast, created by Beyond Arts. It looks at life beyond a cancer diagnosis when you’re a teenager, and features seven topics from seven young people who have been supported by Teenage Cancer Trust.
For the latest series, podcast hosts Alice-May Purkiss and Toby Peach hand over the mic to two young people, Shaumya and Aiden, each of whom featured as storytellers in previous episodes and will now present the show themselves.
Young people Jak, Lauren, Maddie, Poppy, Connor, Yami, and Amber talk candidly, movingly and with humour about a range of topics, from mental health and identity to hair loss, relationships, and motherhood.
The series opens with an interview with Jak, who was diagnosed with advanced melanoma aged 21. He talks about how he has used cancer as a platform for conquering his fears – including heights, fireworks, and spiders!
Jak says: “The mental health side of cancer for me was huge. For so long, I just didn’t want to believe that I was in this situation. I didn’t want to hear about it, I didn’t want to speak about it. I bottled it up and kept it filling up and filling up for so long.
“It’s the side that you don’t see, that’s not maybe spoken about enough and which is why I speak about it. Because if I can make one person feel less alone, it gives my pain a purpose.”
Episodes of the new series will go live weekly from July 5.
Jak
