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They made sympathetic sighing noises and said Poor mommy and then launched into the reports about their day, plans, games, requests to go buy spray paint and visit a toy store.

Later, while I was making dinner, my six year old son came into the kitchen and looked at me. He pointed at my face. That detracts from your prettiness, he said.

I laughed and replied Don't worry, it will heal soon.

My adventures with chronic illness started before I was old enough to walk. The cancer was diagnosed on my twelfth birthday. I've never concerned myself with questions of beauty; I wasn't properly socialized. I never learned to care about the horror that raged in the hearts of other teenage girls. How could I attend to normal worries about appearance when my jaw was wired shut, my skin greenish-blue, my stomach ulcerated, my kidneys inflamed with a persistent strep infection, my torso lacerated with scars? It was hard enough to stay upright most of the time.

I was never the Molly Ringwald character from Sixteen Candles. I was always the Joan Cusack character in a neck brace, unable to get a drink of water from the fountain without using her shirt as a bib.

There is a huge benefit to growing up the way I did. I learned to be tough, and I learned the enervating effects of confidence. Precisely because I was so far outside the boundaries of the normative teen experience, I walked out of those years without any destructive ideas about how I look.

I don't know how I look, only how I feel. I don't know how other people look; I missed the training sessions on how to discern the difference, deconstruct the social truth. When other people talk about crushes or say that so-and-so is cute, I stare blankly. I cannot recall ever thinking someone was handsome, or beautiful, or sexy, or any of the shorthand phrases for superficial attraction.

I walk through the world with pristine confidence and a complete lack of concern about appearance. I'm not arrogant. I just don't care. I wear the clothes I like, for myself; everything about my appearance is calculated but there is no audience beyond my own desire.

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