Tag: Self-Identity

Swinging My Hips

(Title image: Photo by Jessie Shaw on Unsplash)

It’s been over nine years since my cancer diagnosis and treatment. That’s almost a decade, which is hard to believe! But here I am.

While the physical side effects of the cancer treatment itself are mainly gone, I am still dealing with some weird psychological ones. One of the most unexpected effects for me was that I lost a chunk of my self-identity.

I’ve written in the past about difficulty of dealing with this change in my sense of self. Part of it was hormonal, brought on by endocrine therapy. I had been pre-/peri-menopausal when I started treatment so I wasn’t ready for menopause. There was so much anxiety associated with surviving cancer, chemo and radiation, the thought of also dealing with one of the biggest changes in a woman’s life hadn’t even occurred to me. I had not seen that far into the future because I was afraid that I’d never get there.

Ah, the joys of letting your body guide how you move through the world.
(Photo by Liberty Ann on Unsplash)

All of this is a long-winded way of getting to the actual point of this post…

So in the aftermath of cancer and this semi-identity crisis, while in yoga teacher training, someone made a comment that stuck with me.

I had bumped into one of the other teacher trainees outside a shopping mall, who said she recognized me from far away. She explained, “I could tell it was you from your walk.”

I didn’t ask for elaboration, but it seemed like an odd comment and made me wonder, what exactly did she see in my walk that made it look so distinct? Some time later, someone else said the same thing! So I started to pay attention.

I realized I wasn’t walking the way I used to.

My walk had become a very quick-paced, tight-strided gait. When I considered myself from the side, my movement looked uncomfortable and self-conscious, as if I were trying to be invisible and not take up space, no mean feat for a nearly six-foot-tall woman.

My flowing saunter had been replaced with something that I can only describe as “getting from point A to point B with my tail tucked between my legs.”

I didn’t feel like a woman. I felt like a survivor, which in itself is not a bad thing. But I defined myself as one, and it had become an all-encompassing definition. Yes, I had survived, but now what?

Moving smoothly, gracefully…
(Photo by Akshaya Jayaprakash on Unsplash)

It wasn’t until I found myself in a completely new environment with calmer surroundings that whatever I was clenching started to unclench and I found myself breathing with more ease. And that’s when I remembered the comments about my walk.

So I reintroduced a playful, natural swing in my hips. Releasing the tension that had built up. Back before I had kids I’d taken several years of belly dancing classes, and I drew on the sensual feelings from that dance form.

I started to roll. It was a fluid motion that felt so right in my body. After years of squats, deadlifts, rows and presses, it was nice to let go of the tightness and return to something that was decidedly more feminine.

This brought with it a mindfulness of where I am in space, and how I move through it. The simple act of allowing my hips to move in their natural arc has reopened a door that I thought was closed forever.

It’s nice to be back.

When Is A Haircut More Than A Haircut?

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.

I feel so…different. Maybe a new haircut will help?

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.