My brother helped me pack for chemotherapy. The hospital was in a town six hours away and I would be too immunocompromised to travel, so we were moving for 6 months. It was hard to know what to take, and how much. We knew I was going to lose all my hair, but it wouldn’t happen immediately. My brother, in his usual perfect way, light said “I actually think you’ll look really cool with a bald head. Bold make-up, big earrings. It’ll look so good.”
I hadn’t had the space to think about it properly till that moment. I knew I wasn’t bothered by the prospect of losing my hair, but it hadn’t occurred to me that I could enjoy it. All my jewellery, and all my make-up came with me to the hospital.
My six year old nephew made me a bracelet the other day. I needed to figure out the knot on my own, but it was, in his words, his design. He was born when I was in college, and the first time I met him, I was in the hospital, soon after my initial cancer surgery, throwing up bowls of bile. Apparently, that’s a normal course of recovery for a surgery like that. No one had thought to let me know.
I also had a big gold bow in my hair. A cousin pulled it off a get-well bouquet that someone had sent, and put it on me so I’d look a little less dead. When the nurse for the morning shift came in, it seemed like it had worked. “You look so bright!” she kept saying. I hadn’t looked at myself for days, but I knew what she was talking about.
After the surgery, I went months without looking at my stomach. The surgery scar was fresh and grotesque, and I couldn’t bring myself to actually grapple with what it meant for me to find my body repulsive in that way. Every surgery and procedure thereafter, that physically tampered with my body, has made it a lot harder to look at myself in the mirror. Some scars heal to look cool, others just look like damage.
Chemo gave me days and weeks to fill however I wanted. In theory I could have dressed up every day, but I had so little energy. It was as much as I could do to pull up one YouTube video on my phone and let auto-play take the reins. There’s something to be said about the algorithm, but I kept getting video essays on styling and fashion.
I’d always enjoyed jewellery, and had been wearing eyeliner religiously, daily, since the moment I was allowed to, as a thirteen year old. I’d done the whole bit with going to college and unlearning some of the self loathing that comes with being a woman and trying to look nice. But I hadn’t ever actually learned about personal style before.
I benefit from people seeing me as pretty or desirable. Or glamorous, even. I don’t love that I enjoy it. I don’t love that I’m conscious of it. And I definitely don’t love how it feels when I know I’m not being seen as desirable.
I had to watch the videos at 1.5 times their original speed, because they often spoke so slowly. And I learned about my body. It helped that I was on a petty little mission to irritate everyone who would have wanted me to dress modestly. Everyone who asked me where I was from needed to feel slightly uncomfortable with how dressed up I was.
I’m afraid of how fragile it all is. I know how much it takes to feel desirable, and I know how easily that can all crumble. But today, I’m grateful for vanity. For a time, it was all I had going on. I had never actually taken pride in my appearance until that moment. I learned about silhouettes and colour families, and undertones. I learned that I could be academic about my personal style, and enjoy it. I learned that no matter how I actually look, I can do things to feel better when I look in the mirror.
