Through the Looking Glass

I was sitting on the T tonight staring at my reflection in the dark window. Looking at myself my mind filled with the usual critiques and questions: can people tell? Will I ever look like myself again? I also wondered though, why am I so self-conscious in the first place? Why am I so scared of going without my wig? I was with a friend earlier who is also grappling with cancer; she however was happily sans wig and even remarked at one point how she loved feeling the wind blow through her hair. I was jealous. Not only for feeling the breeze, but for having the gall to not feel so self-conscious. I don’t understand what I’m so afraid of. Looking like a boy? Looking like a cancer patient? I look at my friend and think, ‘if she can do it then why can’t I?’ But there’s this little voice that reminds me that I have cancer too, I’m used to the involuntary buzz cut look, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that everyone else is. No matter how I think about it though, how I try to make sense of my feelings, I guess it’s rooted in this feeling of not wanting outsiders to know.

Outsiders.

The only people who have seen me without any hair are my family and then just a few of my closest friends, I guess they’d be the ‘insiders’. It’s not that I don’t care what I look like around them, but I know it doesn’t matter. Is it bad that I think it ‘matters’ how I appear to others? I think I’ve written this before: that I hate how I don’t like the way I look, but I hate more the fact that I care so much about it in the first place. Am I just vain? I won’t let myself off easy and deny any vanity; I don’t think anybody can do that. I do think though that it matters to me so much because I’m admitting it. I’m admitting and acknowledging my cancer. The face, the hair; it’s a physical manifestation of the disease that I look at everyday. It’s not just numbers on a blood report, it’s not just words my doctor is telling me. When I look at myself I look at my puffy cheeks and neck, my sunken eyes, my hair: my cancer. It’s hard enough for just me to see that everyday, why would I want to show all of that to the rest of the world?

The woman who wrote Crazy, Sexy, Cancer hates saying “my cancer” because she doesn’t like the idea of the cancer having any sense of ownership; she doesn’t want to be defined by it. I agree with her; frankly, I don’t think anybody wants to be defined by cancer. I am not my leukemia; my leukemia is a part of me though – ugh this is really tricky! It’s such a fine line: Am I empowered by wearing a wig or by not wearing one? Wearing a wig is covering it up, hiding the fact that I’m sick. But not wearing one shows everybody that I have cancer, admitting the illness.

I guess if I admit it then I’m letting everyone in on my ‘secret’. The outsiders all become insiders. So the next question is why am I so afraid to do that?

And no, the irony is not lost on me that I’m attempting to figure all this out on the bloody internet of all things…….