My body, my battle

By Miranda Shilling

So it’s officially October and this reality is starting to feel real. The constant headaches, the upset stomach, morning nausea and most of all, the hair loss. I didn’t sleep a wink last night, and it’s not because I didn’t desperately try. I watched TV for a little while and all I could notice was the character’s hair, how much of their identity was encapsulated in its styling and coloration. Part of me wanted to just shave my head and get it over with. I nearly cried this morning in the shower while I combed out my hair in knots, leaving a soppy wet cluster the size of a New York City rat on the stool. I looked at the mass, momentarily wondering if it might move, and laughed off my deliriousness with an audible scoff. 

I sit here now, at the mercy of life, and its god of Change, feeling more out of control than I ever have before. But I cannot evade the laws of our universe. Change doesn’t come with a warning label or caution tape, and it doesn’t pause before taking a victim. Like wildfire, it rages, sprinkling burning debris and birthing smaller fires that grow equally unpredictable with time and oxygen. Even when the smoke appears in the distance, flames spread, encroaching and entrapping, until finally they engulf. Coughing, gagging, and crying, I run, terrified of being burned. Yet, I know the scorch of Change well, the blistering wounds left in its wake, raw and puss filled, desperately attempting to heal, and though they do, one is never quite the same. A scar exists; a collagen memory embedded in our very skin, like a badge of our adversity. 

I went down a black hole last night, deep into my photo archives. The obsession started with phases of my hair and landed at an epiphany, just as the birds began their morning greetings. I stopped laughing at some point my last year of college. I stopped enjoying spending time with my friends at all. I felt a reckoning approaching and refused to acknowledge the wave of Change impending. The life I knew and loved so dearly was on the cusp of its end, and I was bitter with the dread brought on by passing time. 

I tend to turn cold when life confronts me in ways I wished to avoid. I grasp desperately for control, flailing until I find something of a rope, and I cling to whatever semblance of manufactured hope it provides. I did this in high school when my parents divorced and I found control in calorie restriction and excessive exercise. I did this in college, when exercise and studying became the only aspects of my life that brought me a sense of agency, and I can feel myself falling now, arms above my head, hands clutching to anything nearby. My spiral deep into my photos, some 24,000 and counting, left me feeling lost and pinning, and with the thought, “I wish I could be skinny again. I want to be that skinny again. Look at how beautiful I was.” That’s the trouble with photos isn’t it? They remind us of a past self we are all too eager to remember, and more often than not I find myself believing this previous “M” was better than the one that exists now. She was more driven or more focused or more athletically toned. While all that can appear to be true on the surface of the image, the young woman I see in those depictions was struggling, too, wondering if anything in her life would ever fit neatly to Plan. 

I grew up a girl who believed she could be a beautiful woman and as I began to lose my hair in brittle clumps and wet globs I realized how much I was dreading this loss. I felt my hair defined my femininity, my womanhood. I joked with my cousin about being Charlie Brown or Kayu for Halloween, and granted I’d make it slutty Charlie, as Cady Heron once taught us, but the fact that they were both male characters made me deeply insecure. I found myself on Pinterest later in the day, and as I scrolled through a montage of classic and formidable women (Audrey. Jackie. Julie. Anne. Just to name a few.) who have chopped it all, and let it grow again, blossoming from girlish tendencies into the woman they were destined to become, I began to think, “hey, I can rock a short haircut for a bit, red lips with some eyeliner. Maybe, I’ll even like my hair short, though my dad used to tell me it looked better long. Sad as all this feels right now, I get to regrow my hair and treat it with nothing but love and tenderness.” For so long I’ve succumbed to the standards molded by the societal glaze and a subscription to the media. How “others” perceive my beauty and my worth and my ambition. So, today, I stand tall, shoulders back, spine elongated, proud, feminine, and beautiful regardless of the standards I feel prescribed. Having no hair or short hair does not make me any less of a beautiful woman. I am a beautiful woman because I can trust and listen to my physical being instead of the world around me. It’s precious when I can breathe in air and let go of my mind to feel and love me. And when I do listen, I can see the battle more clearly than ever: the drugs in my body, tiny fighter ships, shooting enemy targets with white streaks, like watching a meteor shower, in a sky colored hemoglobin red.