The effects of my care are two-fold, more amplifying my feelings of being othered as a person of color who now struggled with her sense of belonging in a nation where most folks do not seem like her.
You can see how the skin on one side of my chest is now markedly darker and dryer than the other side when I do n’t wear swimwear frequently. On the other hand, I suppose I may be appreciative that I have a stomach in spite of everything that has happened.
Therapy has been my lodestar through this unchartered, generally baffling trip that is survivorship. It is where I come destroyed, throw tantrums, rant and rave about the planet and my life in it.
The sweet, wounded parts of me that are still unable to fully understand what I have endured over the past two years are here in my safe place where I can take care of them.
I keep ranting about how challenging everything is at treatments with V. I say, I get triggered by apparently innocent stuff, and I return to the drawing board. Maybe it’s a result of a blood test, maybe it’s a level number, or it’s the weighing scale when you wake up at night wondering when the tumor will return.
Why is this recovering thing taking so long, I cry. Glance at my foolish hair, even if it is not growing as quickly as I’d like, just to see how stupid it is. Why is little changing? !
V is used to my crying. She lets the solitude linger before turning to the piece of artwork I just finished. Look at that once, she says, and tell me that there is no shift.
V and I have been slowly and methodically re-using skill as a tool to help me regain the fragile, broken parts of myself over the past year. The workout for today is to depict my universe in drawings.
A shaman-looking girl wearing a scarf and blouse decorated with colorful fringes and tassels is what I have painted as I look at it. She wears jewels on her neck and hands, and her feet are firmly rooted in the earth’s brown and green. On her mouth, beauty – beautiful teeth, two patches of red, a blue pottu that, from a distance, looks like her third eye. She wears a azure crown with dark diamond on her nose, and around her mouth, soft, fluffy frizzy hair, a colored cloud.
Do you see what your skill has captured, V asks. You have a person who takes up space without being apologetic. She is grounded and articles. She is light with it because she has so much lifestyle and vitality in her.
Look at this representation of yourself on this site, V says. How can you think, therefore, that, everything has changed?
I nod, silently. I am riveted by my own painting. Or probably, I am riveted by who I am becoming.