Stina Hägglund Making it easier… to be yourself

As a young girl, Stina was diagnosed with Morbus Crohn’s disease. It’s an auto immune disease that attacks her intestines. Unfortunately, Stina had been dealing with mismedication throughout her childhood, and it wasn’t possible to get her disease under control.

At the age of 23, after having battled with the disease for most of her life, she became extremely sick. Having just become a mother to her daughter Elle, her intestines were about to rupture, and she ended up having a stoma. Although Stina woke up from the operation with a feeling of happiness, purely because she’d survived – there were other worries she felt. For Stina, a big part of her identity, and who she is, is tied to her clothes. Fashion, style and self-expression were extremely important to her.

Consequently, her new life with a stoma raised the immediate question about if she’d be able to wear whatever she likes: “Clothes are part of my identity, so I worried about what I could wear after my operation.

Today, I still dress the way I want,” she says. Today, Stina is an influencer in Sweden and spends a lot of her energy on creating awareness around living with an ostomy. She’s an advocate for speaking freely about it, for eliminating the shame that’s often connected to it, and wants to make others more comfortable with talking about our differences. She has been on several TV shows, done a TEDx talk in Sweden and much more.

Stina