F*** Cancer (stories from a twenty-something survivor)

7. Loss

There were a few things that I didn't think would bother me, but really did.

Hair loss was one of them.

B.C. I thought, in passing, that I wouldn't have a problem with loosing my hair. I don't know if other people think about those sort of things sometimes. Is that weird? I never thought about it seriously, I didn't think I'd ever actually have to face it, but I thought that I would, hypothetically, be okay with it.

I was not.

I wasn't a giant problem, but I will say that I cried as I ran a brush trough my recently cut hair and it came away full of hair. Side note: you can lose quite a bit of hair before it's visibly noticeable, especially if it doesn't come out in patches. My hair came out pretty evenly and I stubbornly did not shave my head for quite a while. By the time I did, it was sad to see without wearing a hat; it looked better buzzed.

Back to how emotional it was, yeah, I definitely cried. More than once. Usually in the shower as it came out in my hands, but also afterwards as I tried to brush it out. It didn't stop coming out, so I had to say enough is enough and just get out of the shower or stop brushing.

I thought I wouldn't mind because, really, it's just dead cells that look pretty. I like to think I'm not a vain person so I thought I wouldn't minds losing it. But it wasn't the hair loss itself that hurt. It was what the hair loss meant.

Losing my hair wasn't about looks, it was about the fact that I was no longer the person that I thought I was anymore. My mental image of myself was a healthy young person and this was a very physical contradiction to that image.

Did I think all these things while it was happening? No. I just felt it.

(If you don't want a psych lesson skip this paragraph)

In one of my Psychology classes we learned about cognitive dissonance. In basic terms: we don't like when things don't line up, especially things about ourselves, it makes us feel yucky inside, so we do things to relieve the mismatch and make it feel better. You can actually admit that your beliefs were wrong, but that's really hard to do. Humans also don't like change (or admit they're wrong). One common way to relieve it without admitting wrong is to rationalize the thing. Another common one is to overcompensate to provide "evidence" to yourself that your beliefs are still true. It relieves the dissonance. (I don't think most of these are the actual terms, just how I related to them so I could remember the gist of the principle.)

So I was dealing with a lot of cognitive dissonance and it made me very uncomfortable because there was no easy way to resolve it without admitting that I was, in fact, sick. I was not the healthy young person that was one of the traits that I took for granted all my life. And it felt so wrong to think otherwise.

-Cancer (cover) by Twenty-One Pilots