How my style evolved after surviving cancer

“Sometimes it just helps to be the best-dressed person in the imaging ward.”

I remember driving to the grocery store one night and realising I’d forgotten to put eyeliner on. I sat frozen in my car for ten minutes, debating whether to muster the bravery to face the world or to give in and go home. I was in the middle of chemotherapy treatments at the time, trying to embrace a new reflection in the mirror.

After living through the acute parts of the pandemic, most of us are more equipped to deal with life-altering plot twists. Even still, getting a blood cancer diagnosis was an unexpected event, and it undid everything I thought I knew about myself and about beauty.

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Negative body image is a common long-term concern for young adult cancer survivors. Studies reveal that almost half of survivors (44.2 per cent) report believing their bodies didn’t feel complete. Additionally, 16.2 per cent feel dissatisfied with their looks and a portion of survivors find themselves avoiding others as a result. With the effects of chemotherapy leaving me unrecognisable, that was certainly the case for me.

Losing my hair was daunting, and I remember the moment it all started to feel real. I tried putting it off for a while, but when you eventually wake up to your hair in itchy, matted chunks, it’s time to accept the inevitable and get the shaver out. I gradually lost everything – the eyelashes, the leg hair, the peach fuzz. I even lost my inhumanly thick Italian eyebrows, and I used to think those things were indestructible.

An unlined eye at the grocery store usually wouldn’t phase me. But, with a sickly face and a bald head in a frumpy beanie, I didn’t want to be stared at and perceived. For a while, I couldn’t even leave the house without feeling debilitated by my own self-consciousness. Black eyeliner paired with lousily drawn-on eyebrows were the only tools I had to try to hide it all.

The pictures in my camera roll told the story of a girl before and after this diagnosis. I yearned for the life I once had – sunbathing on beach towels after a road trip, hiking through rainforest gorges with my cousins and dancing at house parties on the other side of the city. I had long, curly hair, blonde highlights and curtain bangs that I always complained about getting too oily in the summer.

But, like most girls growing up, I spent most of those years doing everything I could to avoid taking up space. I dissected my style, my voice and my body incessantly. Funnily enough, the body bites back. When forced to exist far outside the bounds of what a heteronormative, Eurocentric world considers beautiful, it’s almost impossible not to draw attention to yourself.

Accepting I no longer had control over my body eventually allowed me to embrace it. This shift in my mindset may or may not have been helped by a purple Fenty Beauty highlighter stick, which was a gift from the Look Good Feel Better program. I wore it as an eyeshadow out to dinner with friends, and it was as if I’d absorbed confidence from Rihanna herself. For the first time in months, I felt a little bit cute.

I started focusing my energy on the aspects of my appearance I could control. It manifested into bright eyeshadow shades, dramatic bell sleeves, cowboy boots and skinny Pamela Anderson eyebrows. I looked for new headscarves in the thrift store, experimented with graphic liner and stacked on layers of jewellery, just for sitting around the house in. Playing around with style and makeup gave me a fascinating new outlook on my identity.

Sometimes it just helps to be the best-dressed person in the imaging ward. It was healing to regain a sense of power over my body again. Crafting a stronger sense of personal style in a dark period of my life was the ultimate practice of self-love.

Instead of hiding away in my room wishing I could blend into the world like before, I started gaining the courage to accept I was allowed to stand out. I was reconnecting with my sense of womanhood and recalibrating what womanhood even meant to me in the first place.

I had no control over the physical changes that happened to me this year, but now that I’m on the other side of chemotherapy and thankfully cancer-free, I’m coming out of this feeling like I can breathe. I have a long way to go to rebuild my life, and still sometimes look at old photos of myself with a twinge of grief. But I also find so much more beauty in myself than I did before.

I went into the city this weekend to eat pizza in the park with a friend. Maybe people stared at me, maybe they didn’t. But with my favourite headscarf, a bold eyeshadow and my biggest earrings, I made sure to give the world something to look at.

For more on finding confidence after a cancer diagnosis, head here.