When you’ve spent half a year hairless.
I am getting my hair cut today, but this is no ordinary trim. After losing all my hair to chemotherapy in 2017, I find myself in a completely foreign realm: short hair after a lifetime of long locks.
Losing my hair was like losing part of my identity. We’re used to bald men — it’s even hip to shave your head as a man. But bald women are seen as oddities, because our hair is tied to our perception of beauty. A woman with no hair is perceived as an oddity — something is wrong. You’re sick.
So hair regrowth took on a particularly important meaning for me after chemo. It wasn’t simply that I finished treatment — I was reclaiming myself. My first haircut, in February 2018, when my ends were getting unruly, was terrifying. I hated the thought of cutting what I’d “worked” so hard to regrow. When you’re a cancer patient and hear horror stories about permanent baldness, getting hair back is not taken for granted. I didn’t finally exhale until I saw little sprouts at the front, and that didn’t happen until about November 2017, three months after my last chemo. I had no idea that it would take so long for my entire scalp to wake back up.
Now, almost a year and a half after chemo, I still look so different from the pre-cancer me, and I get a shocking jolt every time I see my reflection. It’s me, but it’s not me — I guess it’s the “new” me. I’m different and there’s no going back to who I was before. Sometimes that leaves me feeling lost and disoriented.
My husband feels similarly. Cancer affects those we love too, and as I struggle to define myself, he works to understand how I’ve changed. As I’m not familiar to myself, I am also unfamiliar to him. While it’s true we all change as we age and are not the same people we were when we met, normally those changes are slower and we have some control over them. But cancer is the hurtling locomotive that plows through your life and tosses everything you’ve known to the sides. Cancer forces you to pay attention.
So I’ll march into the salon to delve into new-short-hairstyle territory and put on a brave face to make cancer recovery into a positive experience — one that I didn’t ask for, but here I am anyway.
Frantic Shanti 