“It is important that you feel beautiful.” I heard these words over and over again before I started chemo. From my oncologist, from my cancer-survivor friends, from the guy measuring my head for my hair prosthesis.
“Oh noooo, no, nooo,” I would think to myself. “Don’t tell me what to feel. I’m here for the enlightenment.”
I was convinced that beauty and other frivolities had no place in a cancer diagnosis. As the body healed, I wanted my petty ego to heal, as well.
I was eager to learn one of the hardest lessons that simple aging hadn’t been able to teach me: to gracefully accept the subtle but incessant changes occurring to my body — the graying hair, the sagging jowls, the flabby-ing arms. Instead of softening to them, my vanity raged against aging. And as it goes, a lesson will keep repeating itself until it is learned. So here it was — cancer offering me the lesson anew. My body will age in warp speed, and I was determined to finally learn to inhabit every evolution of this body.
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That was the plan.
Nine weeks into chemo, I stare at my reflection in the mirror – the weird wig, the puffy steroidal face, skin dotted with chemo acne — and I think, “Screw enlightenment. I just want to be cute.” I don’t need perfection. I just want to like what I see in the mirror!
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Call it trivial, but the desire to feel beautiful during cancer is to harness the fight within. I saw it with my grandmother. During her cancer treatments, even in the worst of days, she made a commitment to elegance. That beauty translated into inner joy; which translated into an excitement for life; which translated into 29 magnificent years after her mastectomy, outliving her 3 oncologists, and dancing her way to heaven at 92 years old.
My mother is the exact same way. She takes delight in dolling up. After arduous sessions, she dons her glamour, steps into a party and becomes its life. 15 years after her first diagnosis, she is still unstoppable.
For them, cancer is the battleground, and lipstick is the war paint.
For someone like me with no dependents, it can be easier to throw in the towel when treatments get difficult. Feeling beautiful, even if trite, offers a tiny lifeline. And that little lifeline can be a step up to greater things — regaining the self-esteem upon which to engage with all the marvels of the world again. That would be worth the fight.
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I am learning that there can be no enlightenment without our bodies. The body is the theater for spiritual growth. It is precisely because of our bodies that we experience and are forced to navigate life’s contradictions: our hunger to be virtuous vs our carnal desires; our yearning for spiritual maturity vs our ego’s hankering to be pretty.
Yes, the end goal is still enlightenment. But I will drop by the dermatologist on the way there. Because while I inhabit this body, I am and will continue to be, a raging work in progress.