After the diagnosis but before the prognosis, one of the things that made me the maddest about having cancer was the possibility of losing my hair. I have been growing out my hair color practically forever — since May 2017 — and if I was going to lose all of my now mostly salt and pepper hair to chemotherapy, heads were going to roll. If I had known that, I would mutter mostly to myself, I would have just continued with the color until everything fell out. As it turned out, I do not need chemotherapy, and my hair remains nestled securely on my head.

Hair color was a stupid thing to worry about, I know, but you have to understand how trying the entire process has been. I began after I missed a couple of hair appointments, and Chris allowed that he would like to see me with grey hair. You know, he said, so that we could look like we were growing old together. (This is a lovely sentiment, to be sure, but it is one that completely discounts Chris’ own boyish looks: He was recognized recently by a classmate from third grade.) Combined with Chris’ wishes and the fact that hair color left me with a bad rash and made my hair thin out, I started down that road. In terms of length, I expected the road to be a short, rural affair. It has actually been a trans-continental highway, for I seem to keep traveling on it. After almost 20 months of no color, there is still some red on the ends.

What I was not prepared for was how in growing out my hair, I had to transcend hair. It became a personal journey — one of those dreaded learning experiences — that forced me to become comfortable with myself, divorced from how I looked. For with oddly colored hair and a clear line of demarcation between the new (grey) and the old (a strange, faded-out red), I did not look like myself. As a nod to my circumstances, and as a student of bad 70s TV, I began calling myself “Grasshopper” in the mirror.

Because my coping skills are completely suspect, I also became a total fangirl of an unknown woman in a magazine ad. I was in the car with my dad and stepmother, riding in the back seat and singing along perhaps too loudly with Sirius XM’s “The 70s on 7,” and while in the middle of “Don’t Rock the Boat,” my stepmother silently handed me a magazine folded to reveal this photograph:

I have no idea who she is, only that she was shilling for furniture and home accessories that I will probably never be able to afford. In real life, she probably wears black turtlenecks and slim cigarette pants and contact lenses. But in this ad, she became my spirit animal: the glasses, the color, the hat, the accessories, the bright red lipstick, the leopard shoes, the wildly patterned grey hair. I asked for permission to rip it out as I was actually ripping it out, and if you look carefully, you can see the fold line just to the left of her bangles. It has been tucked away with my important papers — drawings by the children, Mother’s Day cards, strips from photo booths — on my bedside table for well over a year.

She has been my secret solace in times of trouble, one that I resorted to heavily after hair appointments. I say this because my hairdresser of a decade — someone I really liked — told me at every single appointment how ugly I looked. You may be thinking two things: 1) he really called you ugly? and 2) exactly how many appointments did you let this go on? Yes, he did, and way too long: Well over a year. It ended in July, when he ridiculed me in front of the entire salon, practically singing about how ugly I looked and how — in that state of ugliness — I had became invisible.

You may be shocked by his words, but I am far more disgusted by me. Why did I allow this to persist? I even stood up for myself in a manner befitting a 50 year-old southern woman who had an overwhelming urge to be polite: I sat through the hair cut, and when I got an email notification telling me that my next appointment had been changed to a cut and color, I called the salon when I knew that he was out of town and canceled all future appointments through the receptionist.

I am not exactly patting myself on the back for winning the overachiever’s award in passive-aggressiveness.

The hero in this story is my 19 year-old daughter, a creature I have referred to almost exclusively as “Squirrel” for most of her life. I told her about a quote I read — Daughter, never grow a wishbone where a backbone ought to be — and I am pretty sure that she rolled her eyes. But on her own latest visit to this hairdresser, when his end of the conversation turned almost immediately to my new-found ugliness, Squirrel jumped out of the chair, wet hair and all, and told him off. She offered to pay for the shampoo, and then she walked out.

So I have another spirit animal these days.

A friend told me last week that my hair these days made me look more formidable, like a real force to be reckoned with. I can live with that.

Even forces to be reckoned with need the occasional trim beyond what her husband can provide on the back porch. With cancer behind me, at least for now, I can get back to important things, like hair. Pushing my anxiety aside, I had my first real haircut in six months yesterday. The stylist had green hair and did not call me ugly. Together, we can grow a mane.

I had been struggling with all of this — the lesson of the hair, the ugly, the wishbone/backbone duality — when I received a message from a reader about her sister. My own sister has been on my mind since I watched The Titan Games, the new TV show by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, who now goes by D.J. (which I suppose is much easier than D.”T.R.”J.). One of the competitors had dedicated her incredible feats of strength to her sister, who was fighting cancer, and with some amusement, I imagined my sister’s utter willingness to do the same as she cursed my good name over getting her into the horrible situation of being forced to drag a 200 pound steel ball or vault onto small, precarious platforms.

But this reader’s sister has stage 4 uterine cancer, which has led to hair loss and a need for a chemo cap. I will be knitting one for her, weaving in all my good wishes and hopes for her current situation. Life has a way of putting your problems — tonsorial and otherwise — into perspective, and this message certainly did.

As someone who had cancer, I will give you this pro tip: People’s complaints never bothered me, although they would usually apologize about making those complaints to me. It’s not like I ever felt that the world would be a better place, or my own situation lessened, if everyone I knew suddenly had a cancer diagnosis. In that uncertain time between diagnosis and prognosis, I dreamed about having the ability one day to complain about a fairly trifling matter — like my hair. It reassured me.

Here I am, terribly grateful to have this as my current largest concern. It reminds me of taking my children to the pediatrician when they were much younger, apologizing that it was probably nothing. After one such apology, the pediatrician replied You really want it to be nothing. I do, too. I love nothing!

Right now I struggle with nothing. I am fortunate. Many people struggle with something. When I prayed during that horrible period in which I fell in the latter camp, I asked only for courage, strength, and a sense of humor to face whatever came. These were the things I could manage, like the folded-up magazine ad that carried me through the great grow-out. Asking for more seemed so far above my pay grade. I say this prayer now for my reader’s sister, too, with the hope that soon her biggest worry will be a rude hairdresser, with the confidence that in her current fight, she will be a force to be reckoned with.

ALC