Confidence

During treatment, I appeared as quite confident to the outside world. I would smile and walk around without a hat/headscarf on and let everyone see how ok I was. Again, this wasn’t how I felt. To be honest, I didn’t care so much about not having any hair whilst I was having chemo because I had bigger things to worry about. After treatment was when I first began to realise that things wouldn’t go back to how they were before. My hair grew back very thin and my legs just looked like a disaster to me. I had this big idea of what I’d look like when I was better and it just wasn’t happening. What I wanted couldn’t happen. This took away my confidence.

I’m often torn between how I should feel. I feel like I should be beyond glad that I survived this awful disease, but I also feel that being happy is disrespectful to those that did not make it. I feel like another person could have survived instead of me, and I don’t know whether to be happy in order to honour that person or if I should feel guilty. Sadly, it is often the latter.

I feel that the physical ramifications of bone cancer have been the biggest drain on my confidence, especially regarding my mobility. I think the people my age saw me being in a wheelchair as a burden to them, because why would they want to push someone around/carry their bag etc.? This knocked me back quite a way, especially in the later years of treatment. I just felt like I drained the fun out of every situation so I started to shut myself away in order to not burden them further. During my last real treatment for my leg, which caused me to need a wheelchair, my group of friends dwindled to one person who was kind enough to stay. This was what really hit home to me because I decided that no one wanted me around and that I made people sad with the way I looked and that I brought nothing to the world but sadness and disgust. This was also when I was diagnosed with severe depression, because my thoughts just snowballed into a huge pile of self hate and embarrassment, thus cancer destroyed my confidence. BUT I have it back. I’m more confident now than I have ever been, the people I’m friends with now have certainly helped with this, especially my boyfriend and my sister. The most important thing you need to do to deal with confidence issues is get the right people in your life. Create a network of people you can depend on and let them depend on you too. Spend less time with the people that make you feel bad about yourself, and get them out of your life if you can.

Sophie xo