cancer-slaying gyrl with a boy cut

I have yet to meet a woman who doesn’t keep a healthy stash of hair products in her bathroom. Our cult-like worship of the best leave-in conditioners and newest pomades is serious business. It can provide a good 45-minute conversation among friends or be an icebreaker among strangers.  Our hair is our badge of honor, our femininity. Even when it’s technically not ours, it’s still ours and we treat it as such.

As someone who took prodigious care of her curly locks before sacrificing them at the chemo altar, let me go on record and say that nothing, and I mean nothing, makes you feel less feminine than losing your hair. It’s a sad day when you have to push aside all those bottles and jars of styling gold that you previously couldn’t go a day without. You long for the hours you spent fussing over your tresses, because, as with most things in life, you never fully appreciate them until they’re gone.

In an effort to stem the tide of hair-loss depression, I chopped my curls at the start of my treatment in June and donated them to Locks of Love, a nonprofit that provides wigs to financially disadvantaged children. My father, out of pity and concern for his baby gyrl, then bought me a very expensive lace-front wig created with someone else’s donated hair. I guess one good deed begets another.

the former me with long curls

My fabulous new hair had its positive aspects: I fit right in among the thousands of cancer-free women sporting their lace-fronts with pride on the streets of New York. And it had its negatives: The bonding glue repeatedly tore out the little bit of peach fuzz I had, which caused a shiny bald band to form around the perimeter of my head. After several months of daily wear, my $600 wig felt and looked more like a helmet than flawless hair. But, hey, we do what we have to in the name of beauty.

Luckily, I was blessed with good genes, my dad, Joe, often reminds me, and my own hair grew back quickly when the first round of chemo ended in October. “You should thank me, because that comes from my side of the family,” Joe says every time he sees me. For the second time in the last year it seems I owed my hair to my dad.

In January, after months of baldness, I finally fished out my basketful of hair care items from the back of the closet. Ah, my old friends. My newly grown ‘do didn’t require them yet, but the countdown was on. In a matter of weeks, I was reaching for my gel. Finally, last week, the day I have been dreaming of arrived. I got my first haircut post-chemo! And to top it off, my new pixie style—or boy cut as my mom calls it—requires an entirely new set of products that I can boast of during the ubiquitous  “what-do-you-put-in-your-hair” conversations I’ll surely be taking part in.

With my products proudly back in rotation, I’m starting to feel like my former self again. Yet, like my new cut, some things have changed. Battling the cancer beast transformed me emotionally, and that caused me to alter my  appearance physically. Apparently, this is common among people who live through traumatic experiences. From the depths of your being, a newfound identity manifests itself outwardly. I guess my new hairdo is mine. It’s bold, funky, and strong—a worthy badge of honor that I’ll cherish with a bottle of foaming mousse in one hand and some styling wax in the other.