The Merits of the Case

I know, I know…another post about hair. Well, what can I say? I’m a bit obsessed with hair right now, seeing as I don’t have any.

My friend Rachel recently gave me India Arie’s most recent CD. (I love it, by the way, and highly recommend it!) I like the messages in her songs and the music is incredible. A little more than half-way through the disc is a song entitled I Am Not My Hair. The first time I heard it I thought about how appropriate the song was for me right now. And then she started singing about a woman who had breast cancer and lost her hair because of chemo, and I cried. The chorus of the song says it all, and it goes like this:

I am not my hair,
I am not this skin,
I am not your expectations, no.
I am not my hair,
I am not this skin,
I am a soul that lives within.

I think that losing my hair has given me a glimpse…albeit a minor, temporary glimpse…of what it must be like to lose a limb. I imagine, based on my own experience, that someone who has lost an arm or leg must think about arms or legs all the time, their own missing one as well as those of other people. I wonder if people who are missing a limb look at people who have all of theirs and think about their unashamed lack of appreciation for those limbs. You hear stories about people who have lost a body part feeling a phantom body part in its place and I have even experienced that. There are times when I find myself reaching up to sweep my bangs out of my eyes or to tuck my hair behind my ear, only to find that there is nothing there to sweep or tuck. It is a strange feeling to touch air where my subconscious expects to touch hair.

I have been super-conscious of the hair of other people since I lost my own. I look at the hair of both men and women with admiration and longing and jealousy. I am frequently struck by the fact that people don’t seem to appreciate their hair the way that I appreciate their hair.

WhyMommy wrote recently about having dinner out with her husband and watching women walk past the place where she was sitting, touching and worrying about their hair and their appearance. As I read her post, I felt like she was reading my mind. As I have watched women deal with their hair and clothes and makeup over the past several months, I always think about how beautiful they all are and about how they don’t even realize it. I am frequently awed by the millions of colors and textures and styles of hair in the world in a way that I have never been before.

I often reminisce about the days when I felt like my hair looked simply awful. It wouldn’t do what I wanted it to or the weather prevented me from styling it in a certain way or a hair cut was growing out and it looked hideous to me. If I could go back to one of those days and give myself some advice, I would point out that the worst hair day imaginable was better than having none at all. I think that I will never have a “bad hair day” again for the rest of my life.

These thoughts about the beauty of hair lead effortlessly to thoughts about the standards of beauty in our society. I have spent a lot of time over the past several years talking with all three of my kids...especially my daughter…about the ways in which beauty is depicted in the media. We have talked about air-brushed photographs and the wiles of advertisers. I have pointed out the ways in which the people in our lives don’t look like the characters on TV and in movies or like famous actors or models, and about how the people in our lives are quite beautiful nevertheless.

Despite these conversations and my convictions about the problems in advertising and the media, I have found that it has been necessary for me to redefine everything I thought about beauty over the past several months. To look in the mirror and see a stranger…someone who doesn’t conform to her society’s standards of beauty…and to accept and to love that stranger as me has been one of the most challenging things I have ever done. To face that person everyday and to see what truly makes her beautiful has been very difficult and at times heart wrenching.

In this constant assessment of my own beauty, I have found myself assessing the beauty of complete strangers in a different way. I look at someone who doesn’t meet society’s standards of beauty and wonder why people don’t see him or her as beautiful. I saw a woman at the train station yesterday who was not especially skinny and who was wearing rather frumpy clothes. Her makeup was slightly garish and her hair was a dull, over-processed blond in an out-dated style. That entire description, however, is based upon what most Americans consider “beautiful” and “stylish.” Most of you would not have thought of her as either of those things.

But she is beautiful. She may be a wife and mother, and I’m sure her husband and kids think that she is beautiful. She is definitely a daughter, and I’m willing to bet that her parents think she is beautiful and amazing and that they love her more than anything. She may be a brilliant banker or lawyer or professor, and I’m sure her clients or students or co-workers appreciate all the beauty of her mind and her talents. Or maybe she works in a retail store somewhere downtown and her customers appreciate her kindness and attention while her co-workers appreciate her hard work and willingness to take on the difficult jobs at work. Although her blouse seemed rather plain and frumpy to me, she probably took great care in choosing it when she got dressed in the morning. Her hair may have been over-processed, but she apparently likes the color and style, and had obviously spent some time getting it that way before she left the house. She is a woman, just like me, and she laughs and loves and desires and plans and talks and cries, just like me. She is not her hair, she is not her skin, she is not your expectations. She is a soul that lives within.

So this cancer diagnosis has given me something else. I like to think that I have always been able to see beyond the surface of people and to see who they really are underneath their hair and makeup and clothes. Being unceremoniously stripped of a feature that I took for granted as a part of what made me beautiful, however, has turned my assessment of true beauty upside down. I will never again look at my own appearance in the same way, and I will never again forget to look beyond the appearance of others in order to truly see the soul that lives within.