Until you figure out who you are, you don’t know how to process and piece together all those different parts of you. When you’re younger, as I was, there are so many different labels.
In a way, traumas are what build us into the people that we are. In wanting so badly to not be defined by the cancer, it actually became something that’s very much definitive of who I am today. I didn’t want it to affect how anyone acted toward me or to even say, “This is Ash. And once the cancer was out of my body, I was so determined to not let it affect me in any other part of my life. I had to spend eight months focused on how I was going to be healthy myself and how I was going to live. To me, when someone’s a hero or survivor, there’s something really selfless about that-someone who is thinking of others. But at the time, I felt very undeserving of the word. As an adult, looking back on it, being “a survivor” is such a beautiful thing.
Once I was in remission and out of the hospital, I was bald and still not entirely healthy, and I had all these eyes and worries on me. The label that came from that was “survivor.” But we’re all survivors, in a way.
Glamour : Is there a label you were given growing up that impacted the way you felt about yourself? Or, now that you look back, think of as a mislabel?Īshley Park: In high school I was diagnosed with cancer, so I spent half my sophomore year-eight months, from when I was 15 to 16-inpatient in a hospital undergoing treatment.
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