How I Found Acceptance and Strength After 38 Years of Self-Hate

I stopped at a gas station on my way back from my oncologist visit. Upon entry to the store, I picked up an energy drink and a snack for the ride back home. When I was checking out at the counter, the receptionist look at me rather judgmentally and asked (while looking at the green colored wig I wore today), “Can I ask why?” in a rather rude and judgmental voice. I didn’t say anything, because my transaction just finished and I was in a rush to get home, but I wish I did. I wish I told her, “Cancer, hope that makes you feel better now” and left. Yet, I kept silent. I have worked in the service industry before. When I did, I always kept comments to myself about a customer/client’s appearance. If I liked their appearance, I complimented them (especially if it was something related to body modification like colored hair or a pretty tattoo), and it was always heartwarming to see their face light up. I was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma in October 2018. I am almost done with chemotherapy, having two more left. It’s gotten to the point where my hair has thinned out so much that to feel presentable to society, I wear a wig. I have wigs all colors of the rainbow  —  both natural and unnatural colored. Oddly enough, it is near Saint Patrick’s Day as of the day of this post and I wore a green wig. If anything, the gas station lady could have thought it was related to that. However, she chose to make a judgmental comment about my wig instead. You don’t know someone’s story. It is not your place to make a rude and/or judgmental comment about someone’s appearance. Especially if you work in the service industry.

I am a cancer survivor. What sort of image does that conjure? What are the words that typically come to mind: t ough? strong? brave? Those words serve to inspire because of the narrative people place around cancer; it is an epic battle and cancer patients are warriors fighting for their lives. But, the truth is, I never felt like a warrior. And now when I think about the fact that I am a cancer survivor, the first word that comes to my mind  is afraid. That wasn’t always the case, though. When my cancer was newly in remission I mostly felt relief. But the longer I am a survivor, the more precarious my situation feels. I was diagnosed with Stage 2 Hodgkin’s lymphoma at the age of 24. An “easy” cancer with a 10-year survival rate of 80 percent. It was very likely my cancer would go into remission with treatment. It was very likely I would continue to survive for at least 10 years. It is also very likely that’s not the end of it. Every treatment I received to rid me of that cancer was, in fact, introducing new threats… delayed threats. They are often called “late effects of treatment” or “secondary” diseases. Radiation directed at my chest increased my chance of developing breast cancer, lung cancer, skin cancer and thyroid cancer. Radiation damage to the blood vessels in my neck increased my risk of stroke. Chemotherapy pumped through my veins was both cardio-toxic and pulmonary-toxic, weakening my heart and lungs and increasing my risk of developing related diseases. The treatments also put me at a higher risk of developing Acute Myeloid Leukemia and Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. At this point, the odds I will have a recurrence of Hodgkin’s lymphoma — my primary cancer — are extremely low. However, with each passing year, the likelihood that some secondary issue will surface increases. It has been nearly 13 years since I was told my cancer was in remission. It seems like a lifetime ago. It’s been long enough now that I can go about my daily life for most of the year without cancer even entering my thoughts. But when something triggers my memory, or forces me to recall the fact that I was a cancer patient all those years ago, a flood of anxiety engulfs me. Each year from October — when my family and I participate in an annual cancer walk — to February when I have my annual follow-up exams… the anxiety builds. It feels like a constant ticking in my ear, growing louder and louder, reminding me of the time bomb in my body. I don’t know when it is set to detonate, how it will explode or if it ever will. But I know it is there…a constant threat lurking just beneath the surface of my normal life. Tick. Tick. Tick. With any luck come February I will get a reprieve. I will feel that flood of relief and settle back into my day-to-day life for several months of hardly giving cancer a thought.

Beauty is a difficult thing to lose all at once. I’ve heard it’s even a difficult thing to lose slowly, year by year, over decades. I have an early memory of an old woman (my grandmother? a family friend?) telling me it wasn’t “her face” she saw anymore in the mirror. Even though the change happened gradually, in her mind’s eye, she stayed forever young. My chemo nurse Diane talked a lot about women losing their hair. The ones who shaved it all off in the beginning, before any ever fell out. The one who had a little balding at the hairline, and covered it up with headbands. The one who lost every strand but one, smack in the middle of her scalp, which she refused to shave. It lasted right through to the end. Going from buzzed to shaved. Photo by Alex Henderson, master of selfies. “But you’re young and beautiful,” Diana said, looking at me and sighing. “So what’s that like?” She didn’t mean, what is it like to be young and beautiful right now. She meant, what is it like knowing you’re about to lose it. I couldn’t answer her. There were too many things I’d have had to piece together, and they didn’t form a cohesive whole. My main thoughts were: I’ve always sort of wanted to shave my head. But not really. And anyway, I’m not choosing this. What if it doesn’t grow back? Now that it’s fallen out (and, at least thus far, not grown back), I realize I would have been wiser to think back to the old woman who didn’t see “her face” in the mirror. The thing about losing my beauty has been that I remain my old self. In every way but one: my appearance. With my cousin on Halloween. Photo by Adrian M Ryan. What I mean is, I still act as though I am, like the nurse said, young and beautiful. I still expect people to treat me as if I am young and beautiful. When they don’t  — when men on the subway look through me as if I’m invisible, when days pass without the mild street harassment that’s been a constant part of my life since I was 12, when my smile is suddenly powerless to change moods and minds  —  these, and not glimpses of my reflection, are the hurtful reminders of what I’ve lost. Am I grieving it? Really? The stares, the catcalls? The violation of being undressed by a stranger’s eyes? Yes. Before, I had the luxury of breaking it down into pieces, pretending each piece was separate. That catcall offends me. The man following me scares me. The man returning my smile affirms me. The one who waits and holds the door warms me. When my eyes meet a stranger’s in a moment of shared attraction, the world opens wide with possibility. They’re not separate. Maybe someday, in a more perfect world, they will be. But in the time and city I live in, these things together are the sum of what I think it means to be a young and beautiful woman. The owner of Hello Beautiful, where I started off with a buzz cut (and still had a quarter of my hair). The thing is, I sort of like the way I look bald. I like the shape of my skull. When people tell me that that I’m “rocking it,” I at least partially agree with them. It amazes me how little this matters. When I look back on it, all the sayings about how true beauty comes from the inside and confidence makes you beautiful, have the ring of false platitudes. Beauty is about appearance, and appearance is about how others see you. Any other view of beauty requires a fundamental redefining of the term. It’s no wonder, then, that confidence and self-love are no substitute for fitting cultural beauty standards. So, yes, I grieve it. Not the hair I lost, but the world I lost. Maybe I knew before, on some level, that the world we live in differs dramatically based on how we appear. I know I listened attentively when people talked about the different worlds we inhabit because of skin color or gender. But I don’t think I listened when middle-aged women talked about becoming invisible. It seemed much less important, and it was. Except I overlooked one thing: if I lived long enough, I was always guaranteed to become invisible, too. It just happened very, very early and very, very fast. This post was previously posted on Medium. We want to hear your story. Become a Mighty contributor here .

I expect there are very few people who realize how vain I am. I mention it sometimes  —  literally, I tell people, “I’m really, really vain”  —  but for the most part, this gets minimal to no reaction. Some people counter with “No, you’re not,” which brings me up short. How would they know? Despite being fairly self-aware where vanity is concerned, I was completely unprepared for my reaction to learning that I’d likely lose my hair, eyebrows and eyelashes while undergoing treatment for Hodgkin’s lymphoma. For days, I kept stopping to look in the mirror. I’d hold my fingers over my eyebrows and try to imagine my face without them. I was going to look like an alien. Me, pre-grooming lessons, 2005 (age 18). I have thick, wiry, black brows and lashes. I was in middle school during the over-plucked late 90s, when it was pretty universally agreed upon that my bushy eyebrows constituted a “problem area.” I used to do the same thing at age 12 or 13: stand in front of the bathroom mirror and hold a finger over most of my eyebrows, imagining how much better I’d look if I could manage to pluck them into a thin, even line (I couldn’t). Back then, I would’ve secretly looked forward to a treatment that cost me my eyebrows. But times changed and thick brows are back in fashion, and I’ve had another decade and a half to master basic grooming and get used to my face with its natural features, and “ O h hell, I am not losing my eyebrows.” Me, sans makeup at the beach, 2015 (age 28). As I started to contemplate the hair loss, a strange thing happened: I became much more beautiful. I thought I’d been vain before, but over the course of a few days in late August, I reinvented the concept. Almond eyes, long lashes, defined brows. And not just my own. Everywhere I went, I was completely overwhelmed by beauty. I stared at strangers on the subway long past their first, second, and even eighth “W hat are you looking at?” looks. It’s not particularly acceptable to walk up to random people, tell them they’re beautiful, and burst into tears, so for the most part I just stuck to staring. I stopped wearing makeup. I stopped appreciating other people’s makeup. Natural features were miraculous enough on their own  —  hell, they were almost too much, sensory overload. I even stopped brushing my hair. It was thick and brown and a little curly when I woke up from sleep  — perfect, right? (Wrong.) The effect faded. I went back to wearing light eyeliner and straightening my bangs, and I stopped staring so much. I also embarked on a complete freak out about losing my brows and lashes. I scoured message boards looking for an out, but it didn’t sound like there was any hope: on ABDV, the chemotherapy used to treat Hodgkins, almost everyone loses their body hair. Then, somewhere in the depths of my internet research on chemo and eyebrows, I came across the technique of permanent makeup, which these days is really semi-permanent makeup, or sort-of-temporary tattooing. Some people, it turns out, get their eyebrows tattooed on before chemo. The effect can be a little weird though, like someone drew them on with a sharpie. After some more research, I discovered a process called microblading. Instead of one continuous eyebrow line, an aesthetician inks on individual strokes, mimicking the look of real hairs. It’s stupidly expensive, but the results look incredible, and having cancer gives you license to do stupidly expensive things for the sake of your vanity. Also, my incredible parents ended up making it a gift  —  I think they were a little amazed there was actually something they could buy that would make me feel less shitty and scared about having cancer. Since tattooing poses a risk of infection, cancer patients are supposed to get their oncologist’s permission before getting semi-permanent makeup. I, however, had only just gotten my official diagnosis and wouldn’t even be meeting my oncologist for another ten days. No one could tell me no. Perfect timing. Or so I thought. As it turned out, the semi-permanent makeup industry is not set up to help cancer patients out during the brief window between diagnosis and starting chemo. Most salons in New York book microblading months in advance, and were therefore impervious to my not-at-all-subtle attempts to play the cancer card. Then I found  Annie . Her Yelp reviews were all 5 stars. Her prices were slightly less than half of those at most New York salons. And when I called, her assistant said she could fit me in that day at 5:30 p.m. Booking that appointment was my first concrete accomplishment since getting diagnosed with cancer the day before. It made me feel bizarrely, disproportionately triumphant, like I’d started crossing things off a to-do list, at the end of which was “beat cancer.” Annie is an artist, and a perfectionist. When she first saw me she shook her head and said, “But you already have such thick eyebrows!” When I explained that they were probably going to fall out during chemotherapy, she got very quiet and had me sit down while she examined them. Then she came back with her verdict: She couldn’t do the microblading, because my hairs were too thick and plentiful to work around. What she could do was the “powder-effect” tattoo  —  or, as I called it above, drawing the eyebrows on with a sharpie. No, no, no. There was no way I was resigning myself to a choice between sharpie eyebrows and no eyebrows. Not when I was so close. I told her I didn’t mind if the eyebrows didn’t turn out perfect  — I could always fill them in with makeup before I went out. But I wanted to go to sleep and wake up with something resembling my normal features on my face. Finally she nodded. She told me that her father had passed away the year before from cancer. He’d also undergone chemo, and had lost his hair. She would try. I spent the next three hours lying face-up on a table with soft ambient music playing and a needle scratching lines in between my eyebrow hairs. People keep asking me if it hurt. Yes, it hurt. Numbing cream is a joke. Or maybe I have sensitive skin. But I’m going to let the oncologist pump poison into my veins, in exchange for which I will likely lose my hair and kill my cancer. What’s three hours of getting my eyebrows scratched up in exchange for not looking like an alien while being sick? When she finished, Annie showed me the results in a mirror. I was the first person she’d ever worked on pre-chemo, with thick eyebrows firmly in place. And she managed a fantastic job: Annie’s beautiful work. The color will fade over the next month or so. She teared up before I left and told me that she’d cried that day on the subway, missing her father. “I’m so glad I got to do this for you,” she said. I’m so glad, too, and I’m also a little less terrified. It’s like I have armor now  —  semi-permanent makeup armor. Thank you, Annie. This post was previously posted on Medium. We want to hear your story. Become a Mighty contributor here .

When I am alone at night, I can recall the smallest detail in vivid intensity — the antiseptic hospital smell, the softness of the cotton cloth against my fingers, the shiny coolness of the bars on the hospital bed, the soreness of my throat from the intubation. My breath quickens, my heart beats faster and I can feel my palms start to sweat. Sometimes I have to close my eyes and remember where I am, safe in my bed. It was worse years ago. The flashbacks were steady, on a continuous loop like the movie “Groundhog Day.” I didn’t feel very mighty then, but I do now. It’s hard to relieve the worst night of your life. I want to believe our brains store the joyous occasions more, like a special Christmas, a wedding day, the pride and accomplishment of a graduation. Back then I was gripped with fear, like a wolf about to pounce or a bear charging forward to attack. You witness the moment immediately prior to the attack and you can imagine what comes next. Except it didn’t happen that way. About twenty years ago I was diagnosed with Hodgkins disease for the second time. The initial diagnosis was a shock but the chemotherapy regimen was tolerable and my father, husband and good friends helped me. The second time it packed the wallop of a hurricane; the cancer had spread into my stomach, one of my lungs had collapsed, and I had a complication called pericarditis — where fluid forms around the heart and has the potential for heart attack. My blood pressure was negligible and I was hospitalized immediately upon seeing the doctor. My oncologist didn’t think I would survive surgery, so they attempted to try needle aspiration to remove the fluid. It failed. When I woke up from anesthesia I was on a respirator to help me breathe. My throat was killing me and the nurses were afraid I would pull out the tube, so they tied my fingers with torn white strips of sheet knotting them to the side railings. I saw the hollow terror in the face of my husband and the tears streaming down my mother’s face. The doctors would have to decide what to do next. They left and I watched the shadows in the hallway and listened to the chatter of the nurses. It felt surreal, like i had stumbled upon a Halloween house and I was enlisted to play a patient. I lay in the ICU all night, running my fingers up and down the railings, trying to will myself to stay alive. When we try to control the uncontrollable, the mind often resorts to magical thinking. I thought that if I stayed awake all night and made it through this night, I would survive. I prayed, bargained with God, counted tiny holes in the ceiling and how many times my fingers slipped up and down the railings. I knew I had no control over the outcome of my cancer but wanted to believe I did. I stayed awake all night and in the morning, my oncologist made her rounds and began an aggressive form of chemotherapy. I faced a year of chemotherapy ahead of me, but I had survived the night. The next year was daunting; I was hospitalized several times for infections, one of which almost did me in. I had sores in my mouth, lost all my hair and a year prior to my recurrence, had lost my father, who was my rock. I was bored. I was twenty-eight years and fighting just to survive. One of the most challenging parts of having cancer young is you feel so different from your peers. They are marrying, launching new careers, having children — and you are struggling to live. The hair loss only serves to exacerbate the difference. In fact, at times I felt I had more in common with elderly people — bald elderly people in particular. I had made a bargain with God that night that if I survived, I would help other people — didn’t know with what, but I was determined to make a difference. I made it my mission to get well and even though I knew the outcome was uncertain, I was not going to give up without a fight. I ate healthy food, walked for exercise, used guided imagery to help me relax, and when I became depressed, went to therapy and took medication necessary to enable me to keep fighting. I joined a cancer support group dedicated to young people with cancer to counteract those feelings of loneliness and being different than my contemporaries. I clung to my sense of humor. One time I was sitting with my two brothers in the living room when a commercial came on reporting one out of every three people will get cancer in their lifetime. I turned to them and said,”Well I guess you two are safe.” As I felt better I volunteered at a mental health center, at first just assisting them with office work, then helping with a suicide hotline. I found I enjoyed listening to people and assisting them, so a few months before the end of chemotherapy, I started graduate school for a Masters in Social Work. The boredom ceased and was replaced with purposeful activity, but the work was fascinating and fulfilling. And having cancer taught me compassion for others who are experiencing the same thing. It wasn’t easy ending chemotherapy. I was anxious about discontinuing the medication used to eradicate the cancer. I had to rely solely on my body to keep me healthy, but it had already failed me twice. It took me time to learn to trust my body again. But I learned and grew from my cancer experience. I am grateful that my body has remained healthy. I am grateful for my family, friends and doctors who have healed me in so many ways. I am grateful for my clients who have chosen to share their stories with me in my 23 years of service as a psychotherapist. It hasn’t always been an easy life. I’ve had a heart attack and an accident that threatened my life in addition to my cancer experiences. If I’m a reincarnated cat then I have at least five more lives to go. But life is good and life lessons are abundant if you choose to see them. Most importantly, I have kept my sense of humor. I’m retired now and have a humor blog (minashumorblog.com) that keeps me focused on the funny, absurd aspects of life. As a trained psychotherapist, I pay attention to the stories people tell, even if it’s a story of the worst night of their lives. I now see mine as a touchstone. It began with a fight, a determination to live despite the pain and uncertainty of my life. It set me on a journey I have loved, despite its challenges and broken dreams. I have to thank the universe for that. We want to hear your story. Become a Mighty contributor here . Thinkstock photo by lolostock