The Selfie Project

I had to ask myself, why did I chronicle my cancer experience?

Even before I was technically diagnosed with breast cancer, I started an uncharacteristic habit of taking pictures of myself. The first one was after my routine mammography showed something that was concerning enough to them to warrant a biopsy. “We’ll have the results Friday or Monday,” a nurse had said. Anyone who knows what it’s like to wait for a test result of that type knows that between Friday and Monday leaves a great chasm of too much time to think. I snapped the picture of myself with one of my backyard hens in the garden, making a joke about contemplating life for Instagram, but really, I was seriously contemplating life. More pictures followed. A photo of me in my wonder woman t-shirt the day I was going in for my double mastectomy. Me in a “Save Second Base” hat, the bandages on my chest peeking out of the top of my shirt. Me, with a pink pixie cut taken two weeks to the day before all my hair fell out. A photo of me lying in the middle of a huge pile of peony blossoms, joking that I hoped this would be what my hair looked like, once it grew back.

I documented the year full of surgeries, chemo and radiation like it was my job. Once that harrowing year ended, and slowly I regained my strength, and my hair, back, I started to feel embarrassed. Why did I share so much? Everyone suffers and so often they suffer in silence. Not me. How self-centered. Cringey.

But with the passage of time came some introspection and grace. Why did I do that, I wondered? What did it do for me? While I contemplated this, I came across a poem I had written in the midst of it all. I remember how hard it was to write while I was going through treatment, mostly because writing the thoughts down was almost too much to bear, too scary. I needed to keep my head in the game and not give a voice to the terror inside. But poetry allowed for a level of abstractness that felt safer. It allowed me to say something, like a hint, but not a full disclosure.

Reading the poem helped me to better understand why I took so many pictures that year. Even when you’re told that your chances of beating the cancer are pretty good, the treatments surely don’t feel anything like healing. Chemo is poison. Radiation is derived from nerve gas. And that is precisely what it feels like. The overall effect of that is for me was to think, they say I’m not dying, so why do I feel like I am?

There were times during that period when I felt so horrible and useless that I wondered what my significance was, in the larger scheme of things. I thought I was critical to my son’s growth and development, but there he was growing and developing without much input from his sickly mother. At other times, I felt almost a sense of panic, a need to feel like I was alive and still part of the world, even though so often I felt like I was trapped behind glass, unable to be a part of it.

And when that happened, I usually snapped a picture. To remind - who? Mostly myself, but others, too I think, that I was here. The comments I received on the photos I posted truly buoyed me, and in some way offered me my own proof of life.

The photos also documented for me that, through what felt a little like hell, there was still beauty, and joy and love, and I was determined to remember them.

I am nearly nine years cancer-free now, and I no longer grimace when a photo from those days pops up on my phone or social media. Now I’m glad I have them, as proof of the family and friends who showed up, the fun times my husband and son and I still managed to have, and the hope I hung on to, even on my darkest days.

Holding Pattern

Oh garden,

You grow and grow and grow.

Your haphazard abundance,

Is almost an affront.

All those years I toiled,

And fretted bad design,

Were for nothing.

You are fruitful and multiply quite nicely,

As I hobble around in a headscarf and housedress.

I’m useless to you now, but, who knew?

It doesn’t matter anyway.

You are gorgeous, little garden, untended as you are,

Swaying in the breeze under the perfect blue sky.

The bees pitch forward drunkenly,

Diving headfirst into blooms.

I am the withered one in the corner of the shed,

The crusted-up fertilizer left open and exposed,

Never needed anyway.

All weeding left undone this year,

Except for eradicating the cancer.

But poison is indiscriminate.

When you kill the cutworms, they take the butterflies with them.

What happens to the landscape then,

Is anyone’s guess.

So, I wait.

While the world around me does what it always has.

I watch, as invisible as the hair on my head,

Knowing there is no picking up where we left off,

But hoping for a small space left open,To wedge myself back in.