Perception of Self: Redefining My Reflection 

The tears burned my face like globules of liquid wax. I lay on the floor—antiquated wooden boards that crunched with the most infinitesimal movement. I felt guilty for crying. I had made it to my senior year at Providence College. I had achieved enough titles to be used as talking points if I ever found myself in an awkward dinner party conversation. When a wealthy woman in a crisp pantsuit asked about my family and upbringing, I could now easily divert the conversation to my collegiate achievements: summa cum laude, a list of honor society inductions, my volunteer work.

This is what I had wanted all my life, right?

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Right. To be able to say I made it. To be able to defy the odds.

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In my early adolescence, I overheard frequent remarks about the impact of parental substance abuse on children’s academic success. With each remark, my pencil drove deeper into the paper. My father was not in rehab across the country. He was on a work trip in Los Angeles at one of the top hospitals in the country. The lies I told my classmates suffocated me like the rope that soon took my father’s life.

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My bookish fervor loosened the knot. I found freedom in writing ten-page history papers when the requirement was five, in doubling up on math classes to prematurely enter college-level calculus, in traveling to Mexico alone the summer before my senior year to increase my fluency in Spanish. I became obsessive—determined to erase the chaos of my personal life with academic achievement.

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Yet as I sat on the dusty floor of my college apartment, replete with academic honors and titles, I yearned for the innocence of the child who existed before the version of me that sat here—broken. Broken by her persistent desire to conceal the blemishes of her past. Broken by the imperfections she failed to conceal, no matter how hard she tried. And now, broken by a physical pain that agonized her limbs.

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I was once a young girl animated by the most trivial things. I lived in a magical world constructed by my own dreams. Lying in this cold, dust-ridden corner, I searched for her. The smiling girl with blond curls, bruises from wanting to play “as the neighborhood boys did,” and an imagination so alive it glowed through deep mocha eyes.

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I looked for her. I did not find her.

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I rose and sat on the gray rug beside me, shifting my weight until I found myself in front of a giantesque rectangular mirror. It loomed from a vacuous wall that held nothing more than a black bookshelf replete with books untouched since the start of the spring semester. My life had become an unavoidable cycle of student teaching, work, and lying in bed like a plague-stricken Victorian woman with wet rags over her forehead. There was no time for reading unless it was about teaching methodologies—and even that mandatory reading became scarce.

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The luminous reflection promised an internal image I did not want to face. I was a twenty-one-year-old who had finally begun to gain a sense of self and a solid academic foundation on which to build a life. Yet the longer I stared, the more I sensed an unknown force ravaging my ambitions, my efforts to conceal my past, even my anatomical control.

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It was not adolescent insecurity that kept me from the mirror. I had known complexes before—my cheeks, my acne, my stomach in a bikini. But those no longer afflicted me. My cheeks had become a reminder of that happy little girl. My acne had improved. And, as it was January, I had no need for a bikini.

Instead of self-loathing, I saw gleaming brown eyes staring back with something close to admiration. I lowered my gaze to my arms and counted my scattered birthmarks as if they were constellations. I traced the minuscule blue veins from top to bottom like narrow, untamed streams my sister and I once traipsed through in the woods bordering our childhood home. Each detail became an extension of nature—of the world that hides behind the coarseness of daily life.

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Then I studied my hands—the lines and innumerable wrinkles that distinguish me from any other person. I had never liked my hands: fat fingers, chipped nails. Ironically, hands had always fascinated me most on others. Twin vessels that carry us through life—constructing, writing, caressing. Even the most calloused hands can reveal tenderness.

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Are hands sacred? I would say yes. I often wonder if hands, not eyes, are the true windows to the soul. I trace the intersecting lines of my palm and recall learning in elementary school: “No two fingerprints are alike.” Does the uniqueness manifested in our hands not mirror the uniqueness of the soul? At first glance, hands and souls resemble one another. Through contemplation, their essential singularity reveals itself.

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When you find yourself in the unsettling wave of comparison, look down at your hands. Trace each crevasse. Remind yourself of their sacredness. Your differences are intentional and necessary. They determine your purpose. No two beings hold the same purpose, even if they share a profession. Professions may fuel purpose, but they are not equivalent to it. Each action and inaction contributes to one’s unfolding design.

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I look down at my hands again. They reiterate exhaustion amid months of unspecified pain. Yet as I trace the rivers running along each limb, I regain just enough energy to lift myself from the floor. It is 4 PM on a Friday. I call the student health center in a last-ditch effort to understand my 103-degree fever.

Within a week, I began my initial twenty-eight-day hospital stay and was finally on track toward a diagnosis.

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The tension between myself and my reflection had been born from contradiction—profound love and gratitude for my body alongside meticulous loathing for the pain it inflicted. But in the hospital, that animosity softened. The daze of IV Dilaudid and the gravity of biopsy results left little energy for loving or hating. My relationship with my body became neutral. I needed all remaining strength simply to survive. I was still breathing. The pain was becoming manageable. Answers were arriving. There was no room for self-pity as I clung to what remained of my body before cancer.

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The adhesive marks of cardiac monitor leads stained my chest week after week. I rubbed my skin raw with no success. My only shower in a month came from hospital towelettes. Muscle mass dissolved. I lost twenty pounds. When I attempted to climb the stairs to my apartment after my hospital discharge, I realized after the first step that I no longer could. I did not recognize myself.

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Chemotherapy layered upon chemotherapy like sediment burying the body that existed before poison flooded my veins. The bags under my eyes deepened. Sores lined my cheeks. As I gained some layers, I lost others. The thin layer of fat I once detested disappeared. After years of disordered eating and negative body image, I ached to regain stomach rolls.

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When treatment made eating impossible and stripped me of control, I stood on the scale watching numbers drop and thought of the muffins, palmeritas, sourdough, penne alla vodka, and cavatelli with sausage and broccoli rabe I had denied myself. I shuddered. I wanted to punch that former version of me in her perfect little rolls.

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Yet weight gain proved equally destabilizing. High-dose steroids, prescribed for chemotherapy side effects and inflammation, caused swelling in my legs and belly. I hid in loose-fitting clothes and avoided photographs. Months earlier I had longed to gain weight, so why did this sudden weight gain feel like a mortal thrust to the heart?

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The fluctuation had little to do with numbers. It was about control. An inanimate disease and its equally inanimate treatments held more authority over my body than I did.

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I grieve myself—the versions that existed before the storm. I grasp at fragments of identity like thin tissue paper caught in a violent wind. I feel emptied. The chemotherapy cuts into me like a blade, leaving me fragile and numb. I sit and stare at walls more often now. I still read. I still write. I intend to remain intellectually engaged until my final breath. But I sense forgetfulness creeping in. The blank stare chemotherapy imposes.

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I fear losing what I value most: my intellect, my mind, my independence.

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At times my body feels like a dysfunctional collection of flesh. The same vessel that holds me often holds me back—from trips, from gatherings, from presence without pain. Yet when the first uneven clumps of hair fell, I chose control where I could find it. If you ever want to feel free at any point in your life (cancer or not), find freedom in scissors. I shaved my head myself. I would not let the drugs strip me of my hair. I would strip myself of my own hair.

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Taking control of my hair set a precedent. For months I wore a clean, shiny shave. Now I wear clipped sides and a softened top. Barber appointments, like tattoo sessions the summer after diagnosis, feel empowering. Amid endless medical poking and prodding, I remain deliberate in how I cut my hair, paint my nails, and dress.

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Once, I thought consistent attention to appearance was vanity. Now I see it as autonomy. How I present myself is a commitment to my agency, regardless of how violently this son of a bitch tears at my insides.

As I find agency in physical upkeep, I find equal purpose in writing and intellectual pursuit. When the malignant monster erodes my exterior, I look inward and find the same wide-eyed girl thirsting for knowledge. Cancer has rendered my body unrecognizable at times, but no level of physical destruction can extinguish her mindset.

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I once feared my younger self would be disappointed in me, now seeing me reliant on oxycodone to control my pain. My father was an addict, and I had said long ago that I would never drink or do drugs in my lifetime. I doubt myself as I pop two oxycodone tablets in my mouth. "Does this make me an addict?" I feel guilt as I swallow the pills. But I take them anyway. I crave sleep. Relief.

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My father’s addiction and my need for pain medication as a chronically ill cancer patient exist in entirely different realms. The connection between them may seem obvious to anyone looking in from the outside, yet his substance use cast a long shadow over my own choices. For months, that shadow kept me from accepting the relief I needed. Only when the pain became unbearable and stripped away any semblance of quality of life, did I finally allow myself the mercy of medication. The expectations we form in youth often become impossible to uphold in adulthood—not because we lack willpower, but because life gradually reveals itself to us, teaching us how we must flow with its current, rather than clinging to outdated standards that no longer fit. 

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Letting go of negative self-perception is like turning our hands from fists into open palms. I once believed that I could craft my life the way I crafted college essays, with tight control and deliberate action; however, this control did not protect me, nor did my achievement give me immunity. For years, my hands gripped control as a lifeline, until my body, the vessel that I thought I could discipline into safety, revealed the fragility of this self-made illusion.

Similarly, the lines on my palms do not run straight. Instead, they intersect, fade, deepen, and curve without any apparent explanation. They remind me that life was never meant to be linear. Control is often an illusion born out of naivety. When I turn my now open palms upward and look down, I no longer see something that I am meant to control or that is meant to be perfect (whatever that means). I see something that has carried me through every day of my life, that has signed medical forms, taken pills, cut hair, and written through pain. I see two hands that have shaken, that have steadied, that have loved beyond measure. They do not control the outcome. They endure alongside me. 

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