Some of you know that I have been on a long and tedious journey with skin cancer. As a redhead with blue eyes and very fair skin, I’ve always known that I needed to be careful in the sun. Growing up, I did my best to use sunscreen any time I knew I was going to be outside for any extended period of time and tried to avoid getting burned, although there were a handful of times where I wasn’t careful enough. By the time I was in my preteens I was wearing sunscreen on my face daily no matter what. Sure, I got a little bit of pinkness on my nose and shoulders here and there, but that seemed pretty harmless at the time, especially when I would watch friends of mine bathe in the sun for hours on end.
I had my first skin cancer removal nearly ten years ago shortly after I moved back to Los Angeles from the Bay Area. It was a basal cell carcinoma, the least aggressive type of skin cancer, and the removal was pretty simple and involved almost no downtime. I assumed that was an anomaly and that, if at all, I wouldn’t have to deal with anything like that again for many, many years.
Little did I know that only five years later, I would enter a phase of my life that would be punctuated with surgery after surgery. To date, I have had 8 skin cancer removals, 5 on my arms, 1 on my leg, and 2 removals on my forehead. If that sounds like a lot that’s because it is.
I have a sister who is only eighteen months younger than me and who I was nearly inseparable from as a child. We played outside for hours on end as kids and, while I’m sure there have been some differences in our habits over the years, we’ve had essentially the same amount of sun exposure and yet she has not had any skin cancers develop (and I’m very much hoping it stays that way for her), while I have found one little abnormal patch of skin pop up on my body after another.
As I write this, I am bandaged up in three different places on my body from more biopsies and am scheduled to have a couple more biopsies taken from areas on my face in the weeks ahead.
I would be lying to you if I said I wasn’t scared, sad, angry, and pretty much any other emotion you might imagine to be fitting in this moment.
I have been lucky so far that nothing has been more serious than a basal cell carcinoma, but even so, the surgeries have not been easy on my body or my heart.
As vain as it might sound, the ones on my face have been the hardest, not because I felt that my features were some pinnacle of perfection, but they are what I have always known and the thought of potentially one day looking in the mirror and not recognizing myself behind my scars leaves me shaken.
I have had to remind myself again and again that I am not my body and even more so that my body is not mine, at least not in a permanent way. Yes, this vessel of flesh is how I move through the world. It is how I experience the sensations of being human. But, it is not who I am.
It is also not something that comes with any sort of guarantee.
Whether it happens slowly or all at once, we are all moving towards disintegration every single day of our lives.
Is it strange that this thought somehow comforts me? Makes me feel less alone? Less broken somehow?
I don’t know what’s going to happen or how much more of this is on the horizon for me.
I do know that worrying about it changes nothing and, while there are still days that I get swallowed up by the sinking dread of things that may or may not ever come to pass, I feel something shifting deep within me, a new level of surrender, because really, what else can one do when confronted with the reality that we are not actually in control?
Resistance to what is only heightens the suffering, so I am trying to find a way to embrace, (yes, embrace) this experience that I never would have asked for but I know must certainly hold some gifts for me. And I think that is part of why I am sharing this here and now with you, whoever you are.
I have been quiet about this part of my experience for so many reasons. Up until now it had felt too raw and too vulnerable to splay out for everyone to see. Even though it makes absolutely no rational sense, there is some sort of shame tied up in health struggles for so many of us, as if we are somehow to blame when things in our body go haywire, even if we have cared for ourselves as well as we could. But if there’s anything I know about shame, it’s that it can’t live in the light of day. When we put it out in the open and say, “here it is, this may not be the prettiest or most easily celebrated part of my journey, but I own it just as much as all the rest of it”, we take our power back. We claim something and in doing so we also open up the possibility for releasing it when the time is right.
If you’re still here reading this, then thank you for bearing witness to this piece of me that I have struggled with most often in silence for really much too long. I hope that if you’re going through something similar, on any level, that this somehow helps you to feel less alone and maybe even more capable of embracing whatever it is that is yours in this moment, regardless of whether you would have chosen it or not. If nothing else, I hope you know that it’s okay to be human. Scars and all.