on (dis)comfort

I’ve spent a lot of time over the past 8-9 months thinking about dis/comfort. I’ve had to go through a lot of things that were decidedly uncomfortable. Some are pretty big discomforts, like mouth sores that left me eating nothing but applesauce and smoothies for a solid week, or feeling such bone crushing fatigue that getting out of bed was nearly unthinkable. And there are the more “frivolous” discomforts, like the first time I left my house with only a beanie covering my newly-bald head, feeling so self-conscious but knowing I had no choice but to swallow my vain discomfort and get on with life (or, really, no other choice felt acceptable).

 
Through chemo I wore my illness on my proverbial sleeve. Some people are able to hide the fact that they’re going through cancer treatment, by cold capping or wearing wigs, etc. I couldn’t be bothered. Also, I don’t think I could have “passed” for a normal healthy person through those months. I looked clearly unwell for most of that time, in a way that went beyond just the hair (not) on my head… puffy eyelids and face, pale skin and gray lips from anemia… It took a solid two months after the end of chemo before I looked in the mirror and recognized the face looking back as my own (or my “normal” face, the face of someone who wasn’t actively sick and fighting against cancer and poison/medicine).

 
But even if I could have hidden my disease away, I don’t know that I would have wanted to. And this gets into the other aspect I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about… whose comfort do I want to prioritize? Yes, I felt self-conscious existing as someone who was obviously a cancer patient, feeling like a walking reminder of this ugly disease that is at best an unpleasant thing to think about and at worst a possible trigger to others who’ve been touched steamrolled by it. I grappled with that feeling a lot.

 
But I also realized that it felt important to remind myself that I had a right to exist in the world as I was, with what I was going through, without having to apologize for it or hide. I was putting my own comfort, the tiny bit I could get during a time when so much was uncomfortable, above other people’s potential discomfort at seeing A Sick Person. I’ve also often been an advocate for making the invisible visible and documenting all the different phases of life (not just the happy stuff), and in some ways it felt like an important act to not hide what I was going through and even post the occasional selfies with my bloated, pale, hairless face as a record of my experience (and almost as an act of defiance against cancer itself).

 

I am now navigating the world with hair that looks like I could have chosen to get cut this way, instead of being so clearly post-chemo growth, and a single breast. I’ve had some complicated feelings about being flat on one side, but I'll save going into that for another post. For now, I will say this: I thought I’d already learned some big lessons in body acceptance and body positivity before all this, but cancer really gave me a much more intensive crash course on the topic. And one of the things that it really drove home for me are that for any body-related insecurity I had two options: 

 1) to feel self-conscious, constantly worried about what other people thought of what I looked like, 

or 

 2) to say “fuck it” and embrace my right to exist in the world exactly as I am in any given moment. That other people’s discomfort (real or imagined) is not my responsibility. That I (and everyone else) get to unapologetically exist as I am, without shame.