The Unmaking

            First, I must apologize for the gross amount of time that has passed between this post and the last. No excuses will mend my lapse of good blogsmanship, so let’s keep going and let bygones be bygones.

            I would be remiss to keep a Hodgkin’s blog without making note of one of the most visibly definitive experiences associated with cancer and chemotherapy: the hair loss. At the beginning of my treatment, the doctor told me my hair may only stick around for a week or two before bailing ship. Redheads have long been associated with many character traits, not the least of which include stubbornness. I have no doubt this is the sole reason I refused to start giving up my hair until over a month into treatment. I think at that point I had just begun to harbor a small, wildly improbable hope that maybe I would be immune to the balding persuasions of chemo, but sadly it was not to be. There I sat one fateful day in my living room, reading a book as nonchalantly as one can, when I reached up to scratch a slight itch on my scalp. That’s all it took to induce a soft flurry of ginger-hued strands to land innocently enough on the pages in front of me. “Well, crap,” I thought, brushing them away. The follicle reaper had finally come knocking, and it was time for me to pay my dues. As the days passed, I could scarcely touch my head without causing at least a few hairs to come loose, and in the shower, the price of using shampoo was at least a tuft or two. On more than one occasion, I had friends come up to me and brush off my shoulders when I had not realized the small drifts that had accumulated there. I let the slow and steady abandonment of my scalp take its natural course for as long as I could bear it, but there finally came a day that I knew it was time to say goodbye.

            Honestly, I hadn’t thought that shaving my head would be particularly hard. When it came right down to it, it was just a really thorough haircut, right? It would all grow back eventually and everything would be fine. In theory, yeah, it’s not a big deal. But when I looked at myself for the first time without hair, everything seemed to get still and quiet for a moment and I could almost see words and phrases being scrawled across the mirror next to my appearance: “Sick,” “Fragile,” “Not okay,” “Cancer patient.” What I hated most was the feeling that I had somehow submitted to this disease, or at the very least been forced to admit to it for all the world to see. I was officially marked, no denying that now. This moment, however, was only a moment, and I think the true difficulty stemmed not from my appearance but rather from the tangible reminder that my body was (and is) fighting for its life. An ugly truth remains a truth, though, and facing it head on is about the best thing one can do.

            After having been accustomed to the feeling of a towel sliding smoothly over my hair after a shower, drying my bald head for the first time felt something like dragging two rubber mats against one other. I also had the misfortune of shedding my head’s coat during the thick of fall with winter quickly approaching, so I felt cold drafts in a unique, chilling way that quickly lent itself to making hats a regular addition to my outfit. Like any adjustment, it was strange in many ways at first, but time has come to make it feel almost normal or at the very least familiar. The exodus did not end with only my head hair, however, and as the days, weeks, and months passed, I became increasingly aerodynamic. I had not thought much about how losing other regions of hair on my body might affect me (other than setting me up for a swimming career) until my eyebrows started saying their farewells. I have always thought eyebrows were odd features to begin with: two hairy islands, floating in the south seas of our foreheads. But it wasn’t until they were all but gone that I appreciated how much they contributed to expression and even recognition of other people. I looked at myself once again and saw something like a blank slate, a featureless face, and couldn’t help but think of one word: unmade.

            No person advances through their life without undergoing changes, without losing, without gaining, without reshaping. And while no one thing is ever the singular cause of the change we experience, I can say beyond a shadow of a doubt that my cancer, reaching back over the last four years, has played a deeply pivotal role in my own story. Of the many things it has done, it has erased some of the assumptions about life that many of my own age might take for granted such as health, comfort, or longevity. Perhaps metaphors or parallelisms are more well-suited for the likes of literature rather than real life, but I couldn’t help but think how my new “blank slate” appearance reflected the reality of my personal outlook. Where assumptions are erased, space is left for new understanding; to form some of who we will become, some of who we were must be unmade. And it was in that thought that I looked at myself, not with shame or repulsion, but with expectation and hope for the things that could be written on the parts of me newly made empty. It won’t make me any less happy when my hair does finally decide to grow back, but taking time to recognize why it’s gone and the implications of what this experience has meant is a worthwhile exercise, at least in this bald man’s humble opinion.