My Body is a Field of Contradictions: The Body, Cancer, and Social Norms

After my diagnosis, my body became a field of contradictions— both physical and metaphorical. I was pierced with needles of every size. Pumped full of ominous chemical cocktails. Shaved bald. My chest turned into a medical playground.

If the intimacy of skin and the delicacy of the body defined a woman, then I was no longer a woman. If bodily autonomy and self-awareness defined a human being, then I had become a beast.

I began getting tattoos to reclaim the autonomy stripped from me in hospitals. My scars were my first tattoos—my medals for surviving to that point. I started wearing shirts that showed them off.

A woman’s skin should be clear, smooth, flawless. That was the expectation where I grew up. But the so-called imperfections on my body became small, fleeting acts of defiance.

My first tattoo was a wave—a tribute to my love for the ocean and all its depth. "Tattoos are just as temporary as we are," I thought. That same day, I inked the initials of my Spanish host mothers, symbols of a home and a love that were both unexpected and profound.

A few weeks later came guerrera on my left arm. I now have mixed feelings about the word—I don’t view cancer in warlike terms—but it was inspired by the song "Guerrera" by Canarian artist Valeria Castro, a tribute to the women in her life and an anthem of resilience and empowerment.

Then came Not Afraid in my friend Eva’s handwriting, a nod to the Eminem song I used to blast in the car after long days of chemotherapy and the unbreakable bond of our friendship. Most recently, I had an anatomical heart inked on my right arm, just above Not Afraid—a heart with more personal meaning than I care to admit. The swallows on my right forearm represent the freedom of spirit I find in nature, and my acceptance of mortality through my bond with the untamed natural world.

While I was collecting these tattoos, a radiotherapy technician—working in a room that felt half-lab, half-spaceship—gave me others: four small black dots on my chest, used to line me up precisely under the proton beams that would burn my skin for the next eight weeks.

As my skin burned (what I jokingly called a free tan) and my chest blistered, my lungs began to fill with fluid. I developed sharp pain in my right side and a violent, lingering cough that lasted for months after treatment ended. For a large part of this time period, my insurance company refused to prescribe me pain medication for this pleural effusion. The denial of pain relief as a result of corporate greed dehumanized me on another level. Was I nothing more than a costly body in the eyes of this insurance corporation? I felt like an object— both one to be thrown around and one to be disposed of. 

Inside, my body was in chaos. Outside, on the morning train, I looked like anyone else. I’d catch my reflection in the window. Did those around me think I was just another commuter heading to a cubicle in one of the city’s glass towers?

My friends would ask why I wore dresses or tailored pants to hospital appointments, and I’d give them the same cliché: "You have to look good to feel good." Part of me believed it. But another part knew it was just another example of the contradiction young adult cancer patients live with every day: the polished exterior society sees versus the private, internal wreckage. A part of me wanted to look polished. Another part of me wished others, even complete strangers, could understand the wreckage so that maybe this venture would be less solitary. 

I don’t have to speak for my body to be an act of resistance. My body is resistance. It’s a sea of “residual zones,” where what is collides with what is supposed to be.

In her book interruqciones, valeria flores (who chooses to write her name in lowercase) quotes Nelly Richards, describing residual zones as unstable spaces where fractured meanings gather— meanings society tends to ignore or discard. They are places of contradiction and fragmentation. They are borders where theory and practice collide, where the dominant meets the marginal.

No one likes to talk about young adults who live with illness and even less about those who live with the constant presence of death. Twenty-first century society assumes youth and good health to occupy the same territory, just as old age and illness are presumed to share another.

I live in neither. I exist between two realms: the healthy and the sick. I live with mortality perched on my shoulder. The sky above me becomes an indecipherable weave of clouds. I try to anchor myself in one place, but it’s impossible. There are no black and white, rather there exist infinite shades too extensive to name. 

 

To live in the cracks of what society assumes or expects is to experience pain rooted in loneliness. I don’t want to be defined only by cancer, but I also don’t want to be treated as if I’m completely healthy. What I want is something more human. I yearn for people to recognize that within me lives deep pain and desires. I do not expect nor want society to name my demons but, rather, to acknowledge that pain and desire exist within even those of us who live in the cracks.

These cracks make it hard to articulate pain and solitude, especially when those feelings don’t show on the outside. On the surface, I may look like any other twenty-three-year-old, but I feel sicker than ever. My treatment options are dwindling. My mental health strains under the weight of physical decline.
"Look at all that hair! You’re almost on the other side of this." I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve heard this. I just nod, thinking, "We must have very different ideas of what the other side means," and I return to my routine—which, by the way, looks less like that of my peers and more like that of a retired eighty-year-old.

And yet, between these contradictions—between social norms and lived experience—there is, according to flores, “an unsuspected fertility for dissent, for the pleasure of disruption.” I continue to see resistance to societally-imposed passivity a duty. Although depression and the physical limitations of cancer often paralyze my thoughts and what I used to consider my daily routine or life path, I now search for excitement in the mundane and stimulate my brain even if just for five minutes a day. If we allow ourselves to live in passivity, we risk losing the authenticity of our thoughts. Resistance is action, and action is resistance. Each time we find creative ways to move our bodies and our minds despite the cancer, we resist the traditional notions of what a cancer patient should look like or should do. Our actions, albeit walking for five minutes and or calling a friend, remind us that we are alive. 

My existence is an act of dissent. The body I inhabit defies the borders between masculine and feminine, healthy and sick, vital and mortal. My temporary resistance to capitalism and the heteropatriarchy is written not only in my skin but on paper.

I write on napkins, in the margins of old books, on scraps of paper, and sometimes in a notebook. I write and rewrite, again and again. Writing not only exercises resistance against society, but against the previous versions of myself. What I write today contradicts what I wrote five years ago. It contradicts what I wrote yesterday. The dynamic nature of the written word demonstrates constant evolution of the self and of one’s relationship with the world. As I continue to move through my journey with cancer, my writing evolves along with my perspective on life and morality. 

I write so I don’t fall into complicity. You may draw or exercise to maintain your sense of self. We can defy the norms through small, daily acts of creative movement because as long as we breathe, we are capable of moving ourselves, however possible, toward greater bodily and identitary autonomy.