Musings on: Gender norms, Ruth Handler, Barbie, Audre Lorde, Breast Cancer, and Mastectomy
Nearly Me? No, I Am All of Me, Ghosts No More
It’s normal for humans to seek out belongingness. We are, by nature, a social species and are driven by the desire for connection. It is no surprise, then, that since having my mastectomy I have sought out a community of others, though as Audre Lorde writes, we can be hard to find, given the ways that reconstruction and prosthetics can function as ways of staying hidden.
There is no doubt that it can be hard to go against the grain of gender norms. I’ve been doing it my whole life, and this from inside the body of a white cisgender person, so my experience is still shaped by many privileges. But those divergences, as life-saving as they can feel sometimes, also leave us on the outside looking in, wondering where our connections are, where our community is. In this vein, I wrote about the experience of “going flat” after my breast cancer diagnosis after my mastectomy. Last week, this essay was published with HerStry. Check it out here:
https://herstryblg.com/theme/2024/2/26/nearly-me-no-i-am-all-of-me
Elizabeth Gilbert, in her most recent Substack Newsletter, Letters From Love, wrote:
You humans are INSANE. You’ve got to be the craziest brains on this planet! My child, my sweet little nutso, do you understand that humans are the only living thing on this planet that ever wonders if they belong here? That humans are the only creatures who can be inside of a moment — inside any moment — and think, “I am not part of this. I am outside of this moment. I am separate from this thing that’s happening. I am standing outside of this time and space, different from all that I behold, alien to this experience.”
And it’s true, I suspect, that we are indeed peculiar for thinking that we don’t belong. In the case of the essay I’m sharing here, to think that I don’t belong in the world of “women,” living in a body without breasts, is certainly a strange way to feel given my reporting on the length of time that mastectomies were performed prior to the emergence of medical science that allowed for reasonable reconstruction practices.
I am, however, in this moment because I am alive, something that was made possible by my surgeon and her team, the clean margins accomplished, and so I use these words in an attempt at clawing my way back to the inside, of a community, of an identity, of this moment, of this life.
