As a person of colour who already struggled with her sense of belonging in a country where most people do not look like her, the effects of my treatment feel two-fold, further intensifying my feelings of being othered.
I don’t wear swimwear often, but when I do, you can see how the skin on one side of my chest is now markedly darker and drier than the other side. On the flip side, I suppose I should be grateful that I have a chest at all, after everything that has happened.
Therapy has been my lodestar through this unchartered, often baffling journey that is survivorship. It is where I come undone, throw tantrums, rant and rave about the world and my existence in it.
It is my safe space where I can tend to the tender, wounded parts, the bits of me that still cannot quite comprehend all that I have gone through these past two years.
At therapy with V, I am ranting about how difficult everything is. Seemingly innocuous things trigger me, I say, and I am back at the drawing board. Sometimes it’s a blood test result, sometimes it’s a number on the weighing scale, sometimes it’s the waking up at night and wondering when the cancer is going to come back.
Why is this healing thing taking so long, I yell. I mean, just look at my dumb hair, even that is not growing as fast as I want it to! Why is nothing changing?!
V is used to my yelling. She lets the silence drag before pointing to the artwork that I have just completed. Look at that again, she says, and tell me that there is no change.
For the past year, V and I have been slowly and systematically using art as a medium to help me reconnect with the tender, wounded parts of myself. Today’s exercise is to draw how I present myself to the world.
I stare at what I have painted – a shaman-looking woman, dressed in a skirt and blouse decorated with colourful fringes and tassels. She wears ornaments on her hands and neck; her feet are in bright red heels which are firmly planted on the brown and green of the earth. On her face, makeup – bright lips, two spots of rouge, a blue pottu that, from a distance, looks like her third eye. She wears a blue crown with black diamonds on her head, and around her face, soft, fluffy curly hair, a brown cloud.
Do you see what your art has captured, V asks. You have drawn a woman who is unapologetic in taking up space. She is grounded and content. There is so much life and vitality in her, she is incandescent with it.
Look at this reflection of yourself on this page, V says. How can you think, then, that, nothing has changed?
I nod, quietly. I am riveted by my own artwork. Or maybe, I am riveted by who I am becoming.