41 year old female

For a year 41 year old female was the only name I felt known by, my whole identity and self beyond this label seemed to fall away. Every form, every scan, every chemo, every pronouncement began there. As if age, gender and diagnosis were the whole story of a body suddenly rewritten. Cancer has a way of unspooling identity, stripping you down until even the face in the mirror so changed you do not recognize it. I did not choose to this path, and I did not choose to go missing in this way; I simply slipped out of sight while staring down the light of the path of medical treatment that stretched out before me. Unseen by name, I clutched the lifeline offered—a poison calibrated to keep me alive, so that I could return to the world and maybe start down a new path, with my own name. 

 

I lost seventy percent of my hair, not all of it. I cold-capped out of fear—fear of the mirror, fear of the world seeing what was happening to me, fear of being called vain when all I wanted was to hold on to any recognizable piece of myself. My hair had always been part of my identity, a kind of soft armor, and letting it fall away felt like stepping out of my own skin. My child watched me with wide, terrified eyes, believing that if my hair disappeared entirely, it meant I was really sick. And the truth was: I was really, really sick. But now, in drawing this portrait, I stand boldly without hair. I feel less afraid of this version of myself because I know now that she made it to the other side.

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In this drawing, I confront that moment of erasure. A scalp bare from taxotere and cytoxin (chemo), forced into my body, my exposed port with the tubing coiled like a question around my neck, and a straight path to follow into the light—these are the marks of a life narrowed to survival. Tunnel light cuts through my fingers and across my face like a boundary I did not ask for, dividing what remained from what was lost. I stand half in shadow behind my label and diagnosis, half in clarity, seeking life in the future, suspended between the person I once recognized and the one I was trying to hold onto.

 

Yet even in that suspended state, something refused to disappear. I walked away from my first oncologist; to her, I was nothing beyond the diagnosis typed above my name, a presence barely acknowledged in the room. My second oncologist looked at me — really looked — and in that small act I felt the faint return of personhood. Over time, hair grows back, eyelashes, too. I am trying now to re-learns how to feel human. Survival isn’t simply enduring, but a long, vigilant after, and a reclamation of my name.