For Those Who Asked Why…
May 2010: Looking back on a decade of healing
I am out of the house for the first time since I shaved my head five days ago. Except for the dinner on Sunday night for a friend’s birthday celebration where I was surrounded by people who know, love, and support me. But this is the first time I’m out alone at a meal with my newly shaved head. I squelch the urge to reach up and rub my head. So here I am at Coffee & Company, waiting for my breakfast. No groceries in the fridge, a new friend visiting for whom I can make little more than a cup of tea this evening, an hour away from an upcoming intense two-hour therapy session. My mind feeling fine with all of this but my neck and arm in a spasm of pain that I have been “feeling” almost nonstop for two months. And how great that I can feel that pain instead of being numb to it!
The restaurant smells of some delicious blend of coffee, freshly baked desserts sitting in the glass display case, and frying onions. All smells that I love. It also smells of bacon, ham, sausage and chorizo; I ignore these odors successfully. My food is almost here: Belgian waffle with bananas and strawberries, pecans if my late order can get them in. Eggs over medium with a side of potatoes. The tea is good and hot, but the cups have gotten smaller since I was last here, and smaller than the ones I use at home.
This is not what I have been planning to write about since shaving my head. The busboy has brought me a beautiful new cup of tea, freshly brewed; and even though it is so busy, the waiter has not brought my check and no one is asking me if I am done as I write this. So I settle in, grab some napkins for the tears that will no doubt ensue, and start writing.
This is what I meant to write.
The three things that I have been most proud of in my life were that I didn’t lie, I couldn’t fart, and I had never masturbated. These were the three things which defined my identity to me. But I find I was mistaken on all counts. I did indeed lie, to the most important person in the world: me. I lied to myself and did not even know it, erased as my own history was from my mind. The only reason I could not fart was that a botched rectal repair at 27 after my 4-day old baby’s father had forced himself on me, tearing the stitches of my episiotomy, had left me with a cut sphincter, leaking feces with every passing of gas, and leaving me virtually fart-less. And I never masturbated myself in my own memory because of only learning 2 years ago that I had been sexually molested since I was an infant, my vagina and rectum and mouth intruded upon, trained to perform fellatio until I was pubescent.
Which was the summer I was raped.
At one stomach-churning, memory-repressing, dissociative personalities creating, father-and-uncle-working-in-tandem, month long rape/fest when I was ten years old. So I have had to find new ways of defining myself lately.
The three things I absolutely loved about myself happened to all be parts of my body. I’m not including my breasts, which I adore. They walk into a room before me and wave hello. Or they did, a decade or two ago. My mouth: filled with 32 perfectly formed teeth, framed by juicy thick pink-plum lips that needed no lipstick. My hands and feet: square, trim, beautiful digits ending in naturally oval nails. My hair, which grew with abandon, and went from curls to waves as I aged. When it finally started turning gray around my fiftieth birthday, it did so attractively around my temples with a shock at mid-forehead, and had the grace to do so in a sparkle of silver.
My toes I broke ten years ago in 2001, tripping over a vacuum cleaner cord as I ran to deliver some last minute message one morning to my then husband as he left for work. Not being diagnosed as broken for nine months, when the orthopedic surgeon finally performed the repair of my dangling digits, it left the “ring” toes on both feet shorter than their brothers, and unable to lie flat on the floor.
Walking in the “Coming Out Day” parade in Los Angeles two years ago in 2008, I was exhilarated as I stopped to talk to some brave queer Desi folk with me. Tripping and falling, hitting my face on the cement end piece of the parking spot where I was standing. The front tooth on the right broke through my perfect smile in a huge crescent, coloring the landscape of my shirtfront a deep crimson. Incompetent dental repair caused its neighbor to become loose and also be replaced. The dentist ground down the poor incisor to fit a cap on it, something that I had never had done. After many incidents of the cap falling off, I no longer replace it. So there is a sadly gray incisor next to a not quite correctly placed front tooth in my formerly perfect mouth.
Rather than let something happen to my last remaining source of vanity, last Saturday I had my friend and salon owner Liz shave it off. We scheduled it as her last appointment, and although she had offered to come to my home to ease the ordeal, I felt strong enough to go to the salon. I knew the gravity of such a decision, and had invited several friends to come witness it, to hold my hand and wipe my tears as I transformed. But not a single of the half-dozen invitees were able to attend. Some of them were busy in rehearsals, and others no doubt were undergoing transformations of their own that I had lost track of, as we are wont to do when we are embroiled within our own lives. I saw that it was exactly as it was meant to be: it was exactly the circumstance that was required. I wanted to “let go” of my hair as a symbol and metaphor for the much greater “letting go” that was required. The letting go of my past, my unexamined addictions, my OCD rituals. In short, of the shaking up of my belief system. What better way to accomplish this than to let go the expectations of support and camaraderie in a milestone that needed to be, in essence, a step alone in my solitary journey to healing.
In accordance with this new understanding, this new found hope of transformation, today I have let emails go unanswered, read the comics section of the LA Times with my morning meal instead of saving them for bedtime. Come out to eat alone instead of replenishing my pantry or stocking my refrigerator. Had a lovely cup of brewed Persian tea served by a busboy who has not once spoken to me in the five years I have been coming to Coffee & Company. Or shyly smiled at me. Until today.
I gather my things to embark on the rest of my day. Like everyone else has been doing this week, I rub my hand on my head for luck where the hair is already starting to come in.
** This essay was written in 2010 at UCLA.
