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The Story:
April 2014
This is the third year of the Ode to Rain Project (happy birthday!) and the 2nd annual St. Baldrick's event at Great Neck South High. I was asked to talk about a time I grew, so I'll talk about how I learned to be brave.
I created the Ode to Rain Project (OTR) back when I was a first-year in high school. I was fresh out of middle school, shy, quiet, and trembling with nervous ambition. I was determined to scare myself - to spare no day in my crusade to change some shrinking, frightened part of me that kept saying, "meep." Basically, I wanted to prove to myself that I had the courage and nerve to fight for what I believed in, even at the cost of talking in front of people, which was pretty much my worst nightmare at that point.
My hair swished against my lower back as I walked through those enormous set of doors into that endless, endless stretch of hallway on the first day. I had no sight into the future - no prescience to know how my friend circles would expand or atrophy, of how much struggle and joy would be derived from learning in those distant classrooms and beyond, of how I would laugh and hurt and thank the heavens that I was alive that day - and my ego jogged my step from where it quivered in my back pocket.
I was misdiagnosed with a disease that no one and everyone talks about. For a few weeks, I learned how to mourn a life yet unlived and how to smile anyway. When the news of my health came, I learned how to receive a second chance and run like hell with it. A little cancer patient once told me a story about the jokes her oncologists told her before her last round of chemo. I couldn't believe that anyone laughs when cancer comes. One regular school night, shortly after all of this, my mother flagged me down in the kitchen to tell me about her coworker, who had shaved her head in honor of a friend with cancer. And I was struck; inspired.
In hindsight, I chose to become a different person that day. Never before in my short life had I tackled a challenge with such purpose. By the next day, I already knew that I was shaving my head and started planning how I might carry out the fundraising bit of the entire business.
Shaving my head - prior to St. Baldrick's, I'd never so much as looked at a pair of scissors - was probably the "easy" part. Martin Luther King Jr. and other such giants in change-making guided my life. I thought I knew something about sacrifice. Hair grows back, I had reasoned. More importantly, there are real people who suffer senselessly from childhood cancer and I was not one of them. I could give this. What I gave was nothing next to the effort a person puts into staying alive. Not everyone can be so sure of a tomorrow, a tomorrow worth sticking around for, and it is this struggle that I honor with my bald head and activism.
In the end, I don't know how brave I am, truly. I like to think that I am, or can be, because this campaign for courage characterizes my high school experience so perfectly. I often have the feeling of struggling against myself, or something within myself that is holding me back, keeping me tame, quiet, subservient. Sometimes, I wonder if it is a knee-jerk reaction against racial, sex-based stereotypes. Sometimes, I wonder if the reason I fight introversion is because I want to defy all expectations. Regardless of reason, struggle can be found wherever we go. As can suffering. I don't get why this must be. What I do understand, though, is that in the wake of the storm, comes the sun. This idea gave birth to the OTR Project's motto: "Rain is a pain, but it waters flowers and rainbows."
My first St. Baldie's year was more than I ever expected it to be. I stood in front of every class on my schedule to talk about what I was doing - something I could never dream of doing just months prior. Two of my best friends joined me on April 15, 2012 to bare our heads. I'm not sure what it meant to them, or even if they think about it now, but it was everything to have them beside me. Perhaps not to make me brave enough to follow through, but to reassure me that bravery isn't always accompanied by sorrow.
To learn more about the St. Baldrick's Foundation and the good work they do, visit www.stbaldricks.org. The St. Baldrick's head-shaving event is now an annual, student-led fundraiser at Great Neck South High School. Kat has continued her partnership with St. Baldrick's by speaking at New York public schools and helping to establish an annual tradition of the head-shaving fundraiser between the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill & Duke University which she currently attends as a senior. Last updated: Aug. 25, 2018.
This is the third year of the Ode to Rain Project (happy birthday!) and the 2nd annual St. Baldrick's event at Great Neck South High. I was asked to talk about a time I grew, so I'll talk about how I learned to be brave.
I created the Ode to Rain Project (OTR) back when I was a first-year in high school. I was fresh out of middle school, shy, quiet, and trembling with nervous ambition. I was determined to scare myself - to spare no day in my crusade to change some shrinking, frightened part of me that kept saying, "meep." Basically, I wanted to prove to myself that I had the courage and nerve to fight for what I believed in, even at the cost of talking in front of people, which was pretty much my worst nightmare at that point.
My hair swished against my lower back as I walked through those enormous set of doors into that endless, endless stretch of hallway on the first day. I had no sight into the future - no prescience to know how my friend circles would expand or atrophy, of how much struggle and joy would be derived from learning in those distant classrooms and beyond, of how I would laugh and hurt and thank the heavens that I was alive that day - and my ego jogged my step from where it quivered in my back pocket.
I was misdiagnosed with a disease that no one and everyone talks about. For a few weeks, I learned how to mourn a life yet unlived and how to smile anyway. When the news of my health came, I learned how to receive a second chance and run like hell with it. A little cancer patient once told me a story about the jokes her oncologists told her before her last round of chemo. I couldn't believe that anyone laughs when cancer comes. One regular school night, shortly after all of this, my mother flagged me down in the kitchen to tell me about her coworker, who had shaved her head in honor of a friend with cancer. And I was struck; inspired.
In hindsight, I chose to become a different person that day. Never before in my short life had I tackled a challenge with such purpose. By the next day, I already knew that I was shaving my head and started planning how I might carry out the fundraising bit of the entire business.
Shaving my head - prior to St. Baldrick's, I'd never so much as looked at a pair of scissors - was probably the "easy" part. Martin Luther King Jr. and other such giants in change-making guided my life. I thought I knew something about sacrifice. Hair grows back, I had reasoned. More importantly, there are real people who suffer senselessly from childhood cancer and I was not one of them. I could give this. What I gave was nothing next to the effort a person puts into staying alive. Not everyone can be so sure of a tomorrow, a tomorrow worth sticking around for, and it is this struggle that I honor with my bald head and activism.
In the end, I don't know how brave I am, truly. I like to think that I am, or can be, because this campaign for courage characterizes my high school experience so perfectly. I often have the feeling of struggling against myself, or something within myself that is holding me back, keeping me tame, quiet, subservient. Sometimes, I wonder if it is a knee-jerk reaction against racial, sex-based stereotypes. Sometimes, I wonder if the reason I fight introversion is because I want to defy all expectations. Regardless of reason, struggle can be found wherever we go. As can suffering. I don't get why this must be. What I do understand, though, is that in the wake of the storm, comes the sun. This idea gave birth to the OTR Project's motto: "Rain is a pain, but it waters flowers and rainbows."
My first St. Baldie's year was more than I ever expected it to be. I stood in front of every class on my schedule to talk about what I was doing - something I could never dream of doing just months prior. Two of my best friends joined me on April 15, 2012 to bare our heads. I'm not sure what it meant to them, or even if they think about it now, but it was everything to have them beside me. Perhaps not to make me brave enough to follow through, but to reassure me that bravery isn't always accompanied by sorrow.
To learn more about the St. Baldrick's Foundation and the good work they do, visit www.stbaldricks.org. The St. Baldrick's head-shaving event is now an annual, student-led fundraiser at Great Neck South High School. Kat has continued her partnership with St. Baldrick's by speaking at New York public schools and helping to establish an annual tradition of the head-shaving fundraiser between the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill & Duke University which she currently attends as a senior. Last updated: Aug. 25, 2018.