This is Lauren Mahon

Interview | Lucy Donoughue

Photography | Paul Buller

She describes herself as having ‘hair like Demi, and a gob like Dyer,’ but when we meet Lauren Mahon, it’s immediately clear that she also has huge heart and a genuine openness that’s not easily matched.

Her journey and work to date demonstrate that – while life may deliver unexpected blows – with support, we can get back up, steady ourselves, and decide which punch to deliver in return.

As 2019 draws to a close, Lauren – broadcaster and founder of charitable business GIRL vs CANCER – shares her reflections on living with trauma, embracing a much-needed period of hibernation, and why family and the upcoming festive season gives her all the feels…

The last time I saw Lauren Mahon, she was walking across a field in the bright August sunshine, rocking her dark cropped hair and a bright fuchsia puff-ball sleeve dress, paired with heavy black boots. She was fresh from giving a talk at Fearne Cotton’s inaugural Happy Place Festival, and had truly ‘owned the room’ (well, tent) throughout her solo presentation.

If you had seen her in that moment, you may have thought that she was the picture of confidence – but, as we know, appearances rarely reveal the whole picture.

In reality, Lauren wasn’t doing too well. Only a couple of hours before the talk, she’d mentioned that her anxiety levels were far beyond the norm for her. The day had been full of highs in terms of personal and professional achievements, but she was struggling with her mental health.

“Things have been up and down since then, if I’m perfectly honest,” Lauren shares, three months later over a cuppa at the Happiful December photoshoot. “My work can be quite intense emotionally – because I’m telling my story. But I think a lot of the time I live above myself, almost like a third person, above my own body. I go and talk about my experiences, but sometimes it’s honestly like I’m talking about somebody else.

“It’s not good, but at some point, I detached a little bit emotionally because I’ve had to, to survive. And I think that’s how I coped with my cancer.”

Lauren was diagnosed with breast cancer in August 2016 and threw herself, almost immediately, into raising awareness of the impact of living with the disease. During her treatment, she created a community on her existing blog Girl Stole London, for people to share experiences and support each other.

Thanks to Lauren’s personality, energy, and drive the community grew massively, and the GIRL vs CANCER strand of her work is now its own entity and a business which donates a chunk of profits from the sale of campaign apparel, as well as all money from events, to four cancer charities close to her heart.

Lauren subsequently became the co-host of the multi-award winning Radio 5 Live podcast You, Me and The Big C in early 2018, and now speaks regularly at events and festivals, heads up advertising campaigns, and has branched out into even more broadcast work. Her warm open-book approach to life, down to earth matey delivery and sense of humour made her an instant hit with audiences up and down the country.

Things that are happening in my life are unreal, and I want to feel them. I want to live in them.

From her social media and press presence, Lauren looks very much like a woman who never stops; someone who is positively seizing the moment and every hour of every day. “I make myself busy as a coping mechanism, so I don’t think about what I’ve gone through,” she responds when we talk about her perpetual state of being busy.

She’s realised that comes with a downside for her: “It means I’m not giving myself the headspace to connect and process what’s going on, to look at what I’ve done that day and think ‘Wow, that was amazing.’

“Things are happening in my life that are unreal, and I want to feel them and live in them.”

Amazing things really have happened. Not only has Lauren emerged as a successful broadcaster and speaker, she’s also received a large amount of professional accolades, making it onto the BBC 100 Women 2019 List, Marie Claire’s Verified Influencer List and winning a Stylist Remarkable Woman Triumph Award.

Lauren is positively grateful for these moments (she practices gratitude by journalling every night), but also recognises that cancer and her recent way of working has had a negative impact on her mental health and wellbeing.

This is something Lauren is now addressing.

“I made a positive step in September,” she shares proudly. “I started seeing a therapist.

“And don’t get me wrong,” she hesitates before continuing, “I know a lot of people probably can’t afford that. And to be honest at the beginning of this year, I couldn’t afford that. But I’ve had some really nice jobs come in and I’ve just siphoned that money to the side for my mental health.

“I thought, even if I can do this for just three to six months, it would be good to have a space every week for me to process the trauma of what’s gone on, and it has really helped me to stand back a bit and look at how I’m living.”

The therapy is clearly having a significant impact upon her, although the process, she says, was a tough one to begin with. “Every single time I’d been to see the therapist, until last week, I sat in the chair and sobbed for an hour, physically shaking with anxiety and stress.

Styling | Krishan Parmar Hair & Make Up | Alice Theobald at Joy Goodman

“And at some point I had to sit back and think ‘I’ve done this to myself. I’ve put myself in this situation’. I’m still in cancer mode, thinking that tomorrow isn’t promised, so there’s an urgency in everything I do... And actually, I have to stop and allow myself some space to be happy.”

Lauren’s therapist has encouraged her to reflect on the difficulty of the past months and what she wants and needs, in addition to what the future may hold. One exercise in particular, really stayed with Lauren.

Her therapist encouraged her to draw herself and think about her different positive personal traits.

...if I keep giving time to myself to process everything, then the future is going to look a lot different.

“I drew a shape like a gingerbread man,” she laughs. “So God knows what that says about how I look at myself! Then, she asked me to close my eyes and think about myself – Lozza, not Lauren, because Lozza is who I am to my friends and my family and myself. I started to put words on the picture, and I sat back and said: ‘There she is.’ It was like, ‘Fuck! I’m still here!’ Underneath everything, I’m still me.”

This was a big realisation for Lauren. “As much as I genuinely feel the past few months have been tough, I’ve learned a lot, and if I keep leaning in to therapy, and giving time to myself to process everything, then the future is going to look a lot different.”

Part of the process for Lauren is to question the way she views herself and how she might be presented to others. “I have had cancer but I am not cancer,” she says, definitively. “For the last two years almost everyone has introduced me as Lauren, cancer patient, or cancer survivor. I haven’t been Lauren Mahon for a really long time.”

And how would she like to be introduced now? “I am Lauren Mahon, I’m a broadcaster and I’m the founder of my own business. To say that is really empowering, and it does make me proud – but I need to give myself space to feel proud.”

She’s already thinking about how to live and work in a way that reflects where she’s at in her life, and is planning 2020 changes. “My focus next year is to rebuild a life that isn’t around cancer.

“I’ll always have GIRL vs CANCER. I’ll always want to support people,” she says passionately. “However, I am very lucky that my cancer – touch wood – is gone, so I think I’d be doing myself a disservice if I didn’t give myself space to live without cancer both physically, and also in my head.

“I am going to get further and further away from my diagnosis, and my experiences will become less and less relevant because new treatments will come out and other things will be happening in the world,” she explains. “So, I just want to get GIRL vs CANCER to a place where it’s a hub of information, so I can signpost other people to where they need to be.”

This big picture work, however, will have to wait for a while so Lauren can create the mental – and literal – space she needs right now. She’s looking to move flat to mark a new era, and will be scoping out work spaces away from where she lives in order to set all-important boundaries and make home a place of pure relaxation.

There’s also talk of adopting a dog in the future (“I’ll name him Ray, after Ray Winstone.”) and a holiday to see in the 2020 New Year, but before all of this, she’ll have been taking things slowly for the last two months of 2019, in order to recalibrate. She calls this her “hibernation”.

What does hibernation look like to her? “It looks a lot like saying no, and giving myself that space and time. I want to do a timeline of the last year and reflect on everything I’ve done.

“I’m just going to go slow, see friends, see family, do a bit of work on me, do a bit of mending of my own heart, get back into a routine, and make a plan. I’m a woman who loves a plan.” Part of that plan includes spending time with her family, including three-month-old niece Lilly and nephew, toddler Gryff, who she is totally smitten with. “They’re my reason,” she says, smiling broadly.

“I was at my sister’s yesterday, and I had Gryff on the floor next to me, and he had his arm around my calf watching TV, and Lilly was on my lap, and honestly, that feeling in my stomach of just absolute contentment and joy...” She breaks off tearfully.

“l get emotional just thinking about them. They ground me. When I’m wandering around all stressed about a fucking Instagram post, I think: ‘Does any of that matter? No, they do’.”

Lauren says her sister, who has become her best friend, instinctively knows when she needs to be with Gryff and Lilly; “Whenever I’m having a really bad bout of anxiety, she just tells me to cancel everything and come over. As soon as I walk in the door, she hands me the kids, I cuddle them and my body just relaxes. I feel safe, and when I’m with them nothing bad can happen.”

She’s ‘Auntie Larry’ and the love, she says, is unconditional. “They don’t care that I’ve had anxiety that day, they don’t care that I had a lump in my tit that tried to kill me, they just want me to play with them and be there.”

Lauren will be spending time with them at Christmas too, it’s one of her favourite times of the year. “I love going back to my Mum and Dad’s at Christmas. I go there for a whole week and my Mum’s house is like a grotto, not a gawdy one, but a proper beautiful old-fashioned one.”

Lauren speaks a million words a minute when she’s excited, and it’s obvious to see that the prospect of upcoming festive family time brings her joy. There’s one ritual in particular that they keep going each year, despite Lauren and her siblings being in their thirties: “My Mum still wraps our pyjamas and puts them under the tree on Christmas Eve.

“The tradition is that we unwrap them – they’re usually matching – then we have to race to our bedrooms to change, and the first one back to the Christmas tree wins! You don’t win anything, but you win.”

The thing is, you just don’t know what will be happening this time next year.

It’s a time of year that has a lot of meaning for her. “Christmas, to me, is just really special. I’m older now and you realise that with these little milestones in life, in the time between them, things can change so much.”

She pauses, looking thoughtful. “Christmas can feel like a time when you have to be so jolly and so happy and when I was ill, I really wasn’t. I was devastated because Christmas is my favourite time of the year and I couldn’t take part in anything. I was so sad because I wasn’t myself and it was out of my control – and that’s the first time I realised that Christmas can be really hard and triggering when things aren’t right.

“Now, I’m feeling well again, I really enjoy Christmas. The thing is, you just don’t know what will be happening this time next year. Last Christmas my sister told us she was pregnant and this year we have Lilly!”

Lauren smiles again, finishes her cuppa, and heads off to slip on sequins for her photoshoot. 2019 has certainly been one of massive highs, learnings, and deep lows for her, but I have the feeling that 2020 will be the year all of that experience is channelled into positive steps forward and even greater things. She is, after all, Lauren Mahon – and she’s pretty phenomenal.

Follow Lauren on Instagram @iamlaurenmahon Check out Tit-Tees at girlvscancer.co.uk – they make perfect presents and you’ll be supporting four cancer charities with each purchase.