I Feel Pretty

''I am not cutting them. They are too beautiful to cut. Besides, you don't even need a haircut. You are going through the, umm...awkward phase. Let's just play around with some bobby pins and it will look really cute.'' 

It was at 34 years old that I discovered I had been using bobby pins incorrectly my whole life. It was like the time I found out I had been spelling ''insignificant'' with a g instead of a c for years.

I have never been to a hairstylist who flat-out refused to cut my hair. She could have trimmed it 1/8 of an inch and still charged me $50, but she was honest, and I like honesty. I have been seeing her for quite awhile now, and sometimes I think she has a bit of a girl crush on me; she calls me, ''Lover'', spends an awfully long time massaging my head and my neck (which feels great, so no complaints here), says she loves me and needs me in her life. In a joking, platonic kind of way. Right?

Today I went back and had some highlights put in to my curly auburn hair.  In any event...

I feel pretty.

Halloween 2016: Nursing my newborn before trick or treating as the famous suffragette, Elizabeth Cady Stanton.
I had absolutely no idea that the breast he was nursing from had 3 cancerous tumors in the milk ducts and that I would lose my breasts 10 months later.

Feeling pretty, May 5, 2018

Now to some people that may seem vain, but in the cancer world, feeling pretty is very empowering.



It wasn't that long ago that I couldn't bear to look at myself in the mirror. I couldn't even recognize the person staring back at me. I'd had pictures developed from just a few months earlier, and it seemed as if the woman in them was someone else. It was like a part of myself had died.

This was me wearing my pink wig in a beautiful Civil War-era creek during a photoshoot on August 28, 2017, two days before my mastectomy. It was one of the few times during my cancer experience that I felt genuinely pretty. My surgeon would have killed me had he known I was climbing around a creek and playing in cold water right before my surgery, but I didn't care. It was the  first time I had felt free since my diagnosis.

I think losing my eyelashes was the biggest mindf-k for me. My eyes teared all the time, because there was nothing there anymore to absorb the moisture. I almost lost my fingernails, too. Tea tree oil saved them.

When my hair finally started growing back in August, I thought that shaving would be just like riding a bike, something you never forget how to do it. Well, my poor legs were absolutely butchered, cut all over because I lost the rhythm of how to do it over time.

I remember going in to the shower and after washing my body thinking, ''Well now what the f-k am I am supposed to do in here?''. I had no hair to shampoo, no hair to shave. I would just stand there, under the water, feeling so sorry for myself. Pathetic, even. I would end up writing non-sense  on the steamy glass, just to pass the time.

The first few times, after I lost my hair on my head, I even made it a point of quickly going past the mirror so I would not catch a glimpse of myself on accident.

Losing all of your hair is a weird feeling. I mean, you lose all of your hair. And you have absolutely no control over it. It just happens; one day you scratch you head and giant patch of hair is in your hand.

This was after my 1st round of chemo in April 2017.
My hair started falling out two weeks later, after my 2nd round.
In the cancer world, this chemo is nicknamed ''The Red Devil''.
"Because it's red?, I asked, naively.
The cancer survivor giggled.
''Oh, yeah, it's red alright.
But that's not why it's called The Red Devil.
It's called that because it will take you into the
deepest, darkest depths of hell imaginable.''

I played around with makeup, justifying my purchases of ''fancy'' eyeshadows and mascara at Bare Minerals because I was saving so much money on not buying hair products or paying for haircuts.

Naturally it was then my eyelashes began to go, followed by my eyebrows. Just when I had finally mastered how to use liquid eyeliner, too. Damn.

I tried penciling my eyebrows in, but achieving symmetry was never my strong suit. I bought glasses to wear specifically because they would cover my eyebrows as they grew back in.

So now, when I put on makeup and play with my unruly curls and even shave my legs, it makes me feel good. Really good. I never complain about bad hair days anymore, even when I was going through my Eleven from Stranger Things or Senator Al Franken phases. I was just so happy to have hair again.

I feel more like myself.

I feel in control of my body.

I feel pretty.