Take a walk along the path of hope with me.
At it’s finest and most truthful, art is a general mirror reflection of the human condition that as an audience we can individually relate to. It depicts the honesty of a life lived and emotions explored, and while it might not exactly be what we personally know, it’s the fundamental experience we see in ourselves and in our own existence that resonates.
Last weekend, I saw Cake—known mostly to this point for the Academy-snubbing of it’s transformative lead performance by Jennifer Aniston—and yes, at that sparsely attended Sunday matinee in downtown NYC, I had an unexpectedly beautiful, moving and transcendental encounter with a small independent film.
In Cake, Jennifer plays Claire, a woman grappling with chronic pain after enduring a near-crippling accident a year or so before. This resulted in immediate and long-term tragedy: as she struggles with both an almost unspeakable personal loss and the aforementioned excruciating physical suffering, Claire has effectively alienated everyone and everything in her life, from her husband to her support group. Covered in scars that are an outward manifestation of the torment roiling deep inside of her, Claire is mired in anger, with only the daily support of her devout caretaker to hold her together. She’s a woman on the verge of implosion who can’t confront herself until circumstance and sentiment collide to shatter the ceiling toward rebirth.
As I sat through her 90-minute journey, I realized: I saw some of myself in Claire.
Claire’s experiences are hardly a rubberstamp of my own; what the character endures is singular and horrific beyond anything I (so very thankfully) have ever been through, and likewise the complete bulldozing of her life. But the most challenging tribulations and their reverberating impacts affect each of us very differently and specifically, so in a seemingly strange yet not surprising way, I related to the essence of her struggle.
Mine started in 2006, the beginning of a years-long amalgamation of searching, self-doubt and a largely unrecognized crisis of self-confidence. Being diagnosed with malignant melanoma—the sun lover’s skin cancer nightmare—nearly nine years ago at the very young age of 25, I was forced to face mortality much earlier than most. Two subsequent major surgeries and a resulting scar that, in my mind, was Frankenstein-like, left as deep and jagged a tear down the side of my previously smooth and tan left arm as it did on my soul. The anxiety and panic around frequent visits to my dermatologist in the years that followed led to more biopsies and smaller marks elsewhere that wouldn’t fade, repeatedly cracking open and resurfacing much of the darkness that I thought I had successfully packed away and compartmentalized from day-to-day, month-to-month. I had moments—and at the earlier points, long periods—of shelling up and introverting. It was an exercise in self-protection and self-preservation, which became rote habit: the unarticulated motto being, ‘You’re strong; don’t let them see you scream in silence for help.’ So, to survive in the super social culture and career I had opted into the day I moved to NYC a year before my personal plight hit—and which had previously suited me just fine—I became an enigmatic extroverted introvert. This colored my life, the way I lived it (and didn’t) and my interpersonal interactions for years. Really, how could it not?
When I watched Claire’s cut-up body on the screen and the way she internalized what was on the outside, I saw my scars in hers.
Over time, through her emotional and physical pain, Claire, like me, pushed caring, loving people away. She, like me at times, spewed aggression against a world she tried desperately to retreat from for fear of being vulnerable and emotionally eradicated, yet again. Seeing this depiction and the general similarities, I was reminded of that familiar feeling that it was all too much to conceive of—the risk, the fear, the rawness of potentially being hurt by letting people in when so much of myself had already been chipped away at (literally and figuratively).
And how were those friends, family and lovers to know what was really storming inside? I unconsciously placed a lot of value on my outer self then to avoid the rest, based in the idea that perception can, in fact, easily be consumed as reality. After all, this was happening to me in parallel to the rise of a connected, visually obsessed brave new world, where filtered Facebook images and pithily presented online dating profiles didn’t leave any room for pain and imperfection. Never intending to be devious or misleading, it was still me—albeit the ‘marketed’ version, and one that was hard to let go of when you feel that’s what you’re always expected to be. It was survival, most especially for a young gay man in NYC where a premium value was (and is) placed on appearances, position and property. To the majority, you were (are) what you look like, what you do and what you own (or at least, where you rent).
Claire—a UCLA Law School grad and successful power lawyer prior to her incident—seemingly had it all, too. Until, of course, she realized that she didn’t, because she had lost the ability to manage what was happening on the inside—the most valuable asset of all.
Again, I saw some of myself in Claire.
The centerpiece of Claire’s story is her assuredly righteous self-management of her pain through self-medication. While she’s prescribed plenty of pills to keep the hurt—physical, mental and emotional—at bay, she resorts to any measure necessary to get more of what she feels she needs to maintain her status quo. Prescribed pills are defiantly swallowed with glasses of white wine; a friend’s medicine cabinet is broken into for a much-needed handful in the moment; and her caretaker—and only real friend—risks arrest with a ride over the border to Tijuana to replenish her supply when it runs low.
Now, Claire’s particular vice and the extreme extent of her need was (again, thankfully) not my own. But like her, my choices of self-medication were a true root of the problem—exacerbating instead of helping it—and therefore the antithesis of the solution. Only in taking a step back did I realize the correlation between my worst moments and a self-induced chemical imbalance that, coupled with the hurt I was hiding from, fully explained why I felt like I was, for lack of a better term, outside of my own body and unrecognizable as the person I knew myself to be. It was an almost PTSD-inducing experience to watch some of Claire’s behavior because I, too, in retrospect understood on a base level what that was like, as my brain had battled within itself.
To one degree or another, I think (or perhaps, at least hope) we can all relate. These negative methods of self-management are around us every day: alcohol, caffeine, prescription drugs, other substances both legal and not, all of which effect each of us differently based on genetic pre-disposition, chemistry and environment. There’s so much shame and misunderstanding around so much of this, most often resulting in misinterpreted actions, hurt feelings and fractured connections. I’m incredibly fortunate to no longer grapple with it; for me, it (blessedly) wasn’t an addiction, but rather a lifestyle choice in the form of a ‘crutch’—a temporary escape from myself when I felt I needed it. Much like the one you get for a broken leg, it’s a short-term fix that, when you lean too hard, splinters and breaks so you’re forced to learn to walk again, taller and straighter than before. With distance and a clear, sober mind, I’m grateful that I got to the other side, as some who are more deeply afflicted tragically never do.
All of this may read as being more extreme than it actually was, but each of our journeys is amplified simply because they’re our own. What I’ve experienced may seem small to some, massive to others. But emerging on the other side was a big leap forward for me, and that’s the relativity of what each of us trudges through in the world. As with Claire, I was fortunate to have a moment where I decided to take my life back instead of it owning me. By taking control and making healthy choices every day, I found strength in myself—physically, mentally, emotionally—that I never even thought possible, while being surrounded by and embracing the years-long love and support of ‘forever rock,’ there-through-everything friends and family that allowed me to accept myself wholesale and heal. For me, on my path, that’s progress.
I’ve questioned with nearly every sentence of this post why I’m writing it, and more over, why I’m making it public. After all, this could be an entry in my journal that was mine and mine alone. But in the end, I realized there’s even more healing to be had by sharing my story, as reflected through the light of a film projector and the profound power of art. Because perhaps, maybe, one person will read this and know they have a friend beyond the bleakness who understands. Someone who recognizes that we’re all in pain, in one form or another; that we all struggle silently with something; and that it’s just human nature. Catharsis, clarity and communication can only come from confronting the darkness, walking through it and knowing that, at one stop along the winding, opaque path, there will be a pinpoint of a glow that grows and expands into a beautiful shining new world full of light. Honesty with yourself about who you are at the moment and who you know yourself to truly be and aspire to—and being kind and empathetic to everyone you encounter on the way because you don’t know where they’ve been or where they’re going—is what I’ve found to be the key to centered, real happiness and living with an open heart.
As someone who now feels the warmth of those beams of light on my face every day, in everything I do, I can say first-hand that it’s worth all the scars you collect along the way—now viewed as badges of survival and strength—and conversely, isn’t easy, as every day begins a new part of the journey. But like all imperfect things, they are just as spectacular and important to embrace as the good that’s put in our path. The core of the beauty in the narrative here, though—both Claire’s and mine, and maybe even yours—is evolution; the chance to find inner peace that radiates outwardly. After all, there’s truth in the trite, and every moment really is a chance to turn it all around, if you believe and work hard to get there.
I’m glad to be on the road with you, my fellow travelers. I’ll see you along the path, and without a doubt, on the other side of tomorrow, where the light shines warm and bright, and we’ll all eat cake, too.
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2020 Editor’s note: Five years after originally publishing this piece and nearly 15 years after my skin cancer diagnosis, I’m happy and blessed to report that I haven’t experienced any reoccurrences.