Samantha Jones

I recently read an interesting quote by Kim Cattrall. She spoke out about Samantha Jones’s cancer plot in the Sex and the city script. She was against it, because she said it perpetuated the idea that women who are comfortable and free with their sexuality must in some way be punished for it.

If you haven’t watched the show, the character Samantha Jones is basically the female version of a playboy and later in the show, she is diagnosed with breast cancer.

When I was young, I only had crushes on safe, unavailable guys. I was a gangly, nerdy girl with braces and glasses, so it was easy to blend into the background. But when I traded my glasses for contacts, lost the braces, and transformed into a young woman with hips and boobs, suddenly I wasn’t invisible to the unavailable people I had quietly adored. This attention was exciting, scary, and dangerous. I didn’t understand what it meant, but it felt like it was my fault and entirely in my control. I was forced into an impossible puzzle, where I couldn’t feel empowered, safe, and free at the same time. I had to choose.

I made a lot of mistakes after that, and when I got sick, I was convinced that I was being punished for them. This mindset is not something I got out of thin air, it is some Scarlett letter bullshit that is still very loud in our society. If a woman is hit on, whether she wants it or not, it’s something that she brought on, like a siren, voodoo witch temptress luring in helpless men.

I was put in the position to field advances by almost every single man that I trusted in my life, including every close friend of my boyfriend and partner of my friends. And if I didn’t, I had to take on the shame for what did and didn’t happen. And I had to lose friends and gain a reputation, while the men lost nothing. So, for a while, it made sense to me that I would be the only one who got sick. Because my actions, and even just my existence, was the only part of this equation being called into question.

When I read that quote by Kim Cattrall, it all clicked. I am not being punished, I am just sick. We exist in this complex system of bacteria, plants, animals, and people. 1/3 of the world’s population have multiple chronic illnesses and they aren’t all demon spawn getting punished for something they did. And the other 2/3 are not angels. The way we fit into this puzzle is something none of us actually understand, even if we long to.

There are people out there who think that I got what I deserve, but I don’t want to be one of them anymore. I create artwork so I can celebrate my disabled body and empower it again, so I refuse to believe it is to blame. I am working too hard to love it. I want to be Samantha. Samantha was free and uninhibited. Samantha was powerful and confident. And Samantha owned her mistakes, because that is such an important part of being truly free.

Yes Samantha Jones is fictional, but the mentality of being an empowered, safe and free woman should be alive and well. If we don’t believe that it can exist, it never will.

Self-actualized ghosts

I was sitting in a cafe reading and I saw someone I used to know. It’s been years since I’ve seen him and we locked eyes. What a strange thing to see a past version of myself reflected back in the eyes of someone else. My past self was like sunlight and she’s dead and gone now. My replacement is interesting, but it’s still a bit of a shame.

And he came in to the cafe, ordered a coffee, and went on with his day, as if I hadn’t made it to 2023 and he couldn’t see me. Maybe I am a ghost, back in the past. Or maybe he wanted to spare us both the unpleasantness of an awkward conversation catching up over the last several years of our boring lives. I was actually tremendously grateful for that.

I finished my book, looked at the window and wondered why I had chosen to wear such a dumb hat. Sometimes I really feel like a teenager again. I feel so confident at the beginning of the day, putting on fun, sex and the city outfits and sauntering out the door. Ah yes, I am so stylish, no one will notice my cast or my scars. No, they will see my fun hat and my cool dress. Nope, they will see a weirdo in a dumb hat sitting in a small town cafe looking so out of place it’s painful while people I used to know actively ignore me in a desperate attempt to move forward with their lives.

So, I took my dumb hat up to the barista and asked them if anyone they knew had ever ignored them before. And we had a wonderful conversation, laughing and opening up about health conditions and awkward interactions. And I realized that whether I look back or move forward are choices I can make. It’s a bit harder when I spend so much of my time getting surgeries and going to the doctor, but there are moments; windows in between all the chaos of the world that still surprise me when I’m honest and I’m actually myself.

Death, taxes and scars

It’s not quite summer, but it’s the first time that it’s been hot enough to swim since last summer, so it feels like we finally made it full circle back to that lovely time full of fireworks, apple pie, hotdogs and all the other things I don’t like.

The summer has always come with too much pressure. The nice weather guilted me out when I was sick or tired. The sun loomed over my depression like an unwelcome light flipped on while I was trying to sleep. I tried to read through the beach volleyball and taco tuesdays, but a quiet sadness filled those hot nights.

My friend invited me to swim in the ocean recently. Even though I felt like absolute garbage mentally and physically, I decided to surprise myself, say yes, and put my strange alien body into a filthy body of water. After all, this was the first week of my exposure therapy for OCD. I might as well just go for it. Everything is dangerous and horrifying and amazing and it could make me sick all over again, or kill me, or it could flip my light on and wake me the fuck up.

And this glorious yes was followed by a slow sip of tea, the removal of my hand cast and a gentle application of some shimmering, coconut sun-screen that lifted my mood.

It was pretty boring.

Then I put on a swimsuit and stared all my scars down for too long. Way too long. I don’t know what the right move would have been, but this was the wrong one. I had been so sure of them. I had seen them every day for a year and yet, somehow, with the coconut in the air and the swimsuit framing them, they became menacing and out of place. I lingered on them, until I grew restless and changed into a different swimsuit. A different one. A sports bra and boxers. Then shorts.

I thought if I could just find the right one, I could win this chess game, but the scars were always one move ahead. I almost crawled back into bed, but I pulled on a dress, stuffed a swimsuit into my bag and forced myself out the door.

Until last year, I had no physical evidence of my pain or illness. In some ways, this was nice, because I was in control of what I wanted to share with people about my health, but it was also exhausting because it meant that no one could see my suffering, and they had to take me at my word.

When I got my first surgery last year, it was such a relief to finally have what I was feeling become visible. I saw physical scars appear on my body for the first time and I knew I would always have physical evidence marking me as different, so I could never blend in again.

It wasn’t until I was thrusting reject swimsuits at the floor that it really hit me. I didn’t realize how painful it would be to always be reminded of my pain and to never be able to get back to before. And to take this strange new body to the beach. This didn’t seem like a body that should have been going to that silky, clear-blue water, with the red sun falling slowly into it. It looked like it should have been going back to the hospital; like it belonged to that medical space now, in the hands of a doctor, running tests.

But I will be getting more surgeries soon and more scars, so this scarred body will be my only body. I will carry it with me to weddings, art exhibitions and the ocean to swim, not just the hospital and the doctor. So like death and taxes, this body and these scars will be the only truth I know. All I can do is love them all. The only alternative is living in a world without feeling that cool salt water press against my skin and I don’t want to know that world. Maybe next time I’ll skip the suit. I’m pretty sure that was the real problem.