I really hate breast cancer month. I cannot stand another instagram or twitter post with you and your best friends “wearing pink for october!!!” It clogs up my news feeds, it’s in every shopping center I go in, and there’s usually a designated pink day where everyone wears pink shirts because they’re super supportive.

The reason I hate it so much is because while buying pink spatulas and hairbands shows how much you “support” breast cancer awareness, you aren’t doing that much to help. It’s frustrating to see so many people buying pink chapstick and blindly saying “It donates to cancer!” when in reality barely any of that money is going towards research.

Another thing that makes me angry about this month is that no one wants to talk about the non-glamorous side of cancer. Cancer isn’t dressing up in a pink tutu with face paint and attending a football game with your friends. Cancer is pink, it isn’t girly, and it isn’t pretty. It destroys families, lives, and childhoods. It’s a monster and has flipped my family’s life upside down the day that we learnt my mother was terminal in 2013.

Amazingly, all this money being donated by your spending habits in October has not led to an increase in lives saved. Probably because companies that promote themselves to be a breast cancer charity don’t always spend their money on research. Susan G. Komen only spent 15% of funds raised in 2011 for research for a cure. On average, only 2% of these types of funds go to curing or finding treatments for metastatic, or terminal, cancer. Currently the average rate of survival for women with metastatic cancer is around 18-24 months. And yet only 2% of profits are going to this.

Pinktober is frustrating to me. It feels like companies and organizations are profiting off our personal pain to make billions of dollars, and everyone is feeding into it thinking that they’re doing good. Honestly, you’d be better off taking the $20 you’re going to buy from a breast cancer shirt you found at Walgreens and donating that directly to a charity like Breast Cancer Research Foundation that donates 91% of its donations to awareness and research. Post and talk about getting yourself checked, donate money to a charity that actually does something, or help someone get educated. Because those that say “it will never be me”, or “I’m too young”, the majority of women get diagnosed over the age of 50, but my mom was only 35. It can happen to anyone.