On: Hiding Illness and Brave Movie Critics
I was going to come here today to tell you all about my new job, but I got some link love from a friend on AIM and was so moved, that I decided to talk about the upcoming Overlooked Film Festival.
I’ve been a movie buff for as long as I can remember, and when Siskel & Ebert starting coming on in my hometown, my sister and I started watching it on Sunday to see which movies we should go see.
I liked the fact that the both of them were so passionate about the movies they reviewed. Roger Ebert was my hands down favorite. I’d say I agreed with about 80% of his reviews and often checked to see what he said before I shelled out my hard earned money, even if he didn’t like the movie I ultimately went to see.
He posted about the upcoming festival and how he would be in attendance, though not running the commentary as he usually does because he is still recovering from cancer surgery. He said, “We spend too much time hiding illness,” and had the balls enough to include a post-surgical picture of himself at the piano.
This week I’ve been rummaging through my pictures to find the ones I considered “just right” to grace my new office. I wanted to make sure that I had pictures of my daughter, both of the dogs, and my husband. The girl and the dogs were easy, I had tons of pictures of them, but it was harder to find one of my husband by himself. We’ve been lured into the world of digital cameras and usually drop them onto our computer and don’t bother to get them printed. So now the only pics I have of him are from out wedding…and I had hair down my back then. I said to him that I didn’t want to explain my drastic difference in appearance – my hair was obviously real and black folks have a thing about women cutting their hair. I’ve mentioned in passing that I had uber-long dreadlocs to some folks when I was working the other job and they’ve all questioned me about cutting them. “Sometimes you’ve got to make changes,” is how I’ve answered, because I’ve sometimes wanted very much to not be “the girl with the cancer.” But now I have radiation on the horizon and a daily meeting for the next 6 ½ weeks that I’ll need to keep. At the very least my boss will know.
I wonder if he looks at old pictures of himself the same way I looked at the pictures of me from my wedding: with a mixture of deep longing and resolution to learn to love the new skin he’s in. It’s not that the hair won’t grow back, I’m lucky in that respect because his jaw won’t, it’s just that the woman staring back at me in the pictures doesn’t really exist anymore and there’s a lot about her that I miss.
I don’t know if I’ve got “The Balls of Ebert” and will be taking the picture to work to put on my desk with the others. Chances are good that I won’t, at least not yet. But it’s got me thinking, that’s for sure, about how much we hide and how and when we decided to show ourselves.
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POSTED IN: general commentary, on breast cancer
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