There was a recent OS lament about being a job hunter at the ripe old age of 41.

Excuse me for snorting. Add two decades and a history of cancer for a real obstacle to employment.

With my fresh master’s degree, I have been spreading resumes around like manure on a freshly plowed field. To my utter amazement, my degree and experience opened a door that promised a job paying four times what I had made in the schools.

Big Money. Real Money. Rolls of tens and twenties. Money I could use and flush away with no regrets. 

I had made it through two interviews, a job shadow, the background check, and references. It was the fourth date, and I was ready to put out. Just like Greg Thomas, I was at the table with my Social Security card in hand; ready to sign up for the health plan when reality smacked me down.

Was it the silver hair? 

When the silver first appeared, it was in elegant streaks framing my face. As time went on, it frosted more and more. I am blessed with a beautiful shade of silver which blends well with my dark blond hair. This is me. I am beautiful.

I prepared for these meetings to the tune of about $500.  For the first time, I steeled myself for a short hair cut.  My hairdresser taught me how to wield a round brush and a hairdryer, difficult for the one-armed woman I had become since my treatment for breast cancer. I got a facial. I bleached my teeth. I got a massage. I researched the company. I was ready.

I sought advice from professors, professionals, friends, and family who universally cautioned me to conceal my cancer survivorship. I was told, “You will be labeled the ‘candidate with cancer’”. My education is in disability and employment so, as an avid researcher, I delved into peer reviewed literature about cancer disability and the work environment and discovered that everyone was right. Cancer survivors are viewed as somehow “defective”. Employers cite concerns over productivity, absenteeism, and higher insurance costs, but the underlying unspoken reason is the stigma of death and decay attached to cancer. The very first Americans with Disabilities Act case brought to court concerned a man who was fired because he was dying of lung cancer. The employer did not want to see that at work.

Even with my excellent prognosis and courageous recovery, my breast cancer worked against my working.

My difficulty was that my breast was very much still “under construction”. The breast undergoing tissue expansion was two inches higher on my chest and stuck out two inches more than the other side. It was bluntly shaped like a giant hamburger bun, not a natural slope at all. A friend helped me pick out two expensive suits—one pants, one skirt—with jackets which camouflaged my condition.

At the final interview, the panel asked me if I could give them an instance of when I had overcome great obstacles and persisted to reach a goal. I paused and thought about my past year: how I had drug my medicated self through my second year in graduate school while racking up four incompletes, how I had interned out-of-town where family threw me out on a dark and stormy night (and true friends rescued me with the offer of the perfect refuge), how I had three surgeries with the last one a scant week ago and still managed to turn in my 126-page portfolio on Tuesday. I wanted to tell them these things because I believed that it said something important about me: how I could be strong, how I could hold on in the stiffest wind.

And I lied about myself. I gave them a lesser challenge, a lesser version of my true self. And I still believe that it was my best shot.

Was it my references?

These four people know me well in the context of my life’s work of helping those who are the discarded ones: the students without immigration papers whom I followed from second graders to seniors, the at-risk youth on probation with addictions and unidentified disabilities, and the clients with emotional, mental, and physical disabilities that wanted the dignity of work to lift themselves out of the poverty of an 83% unemployment rate. These jobs never pay well; the job I had applied for was not one of these person-centered endeavors.

I spoke with a professor friend of mine who knows me very well a few days ago, recounting this attempt to finally hit the “big money”.

“Mark, you know, I think that they finally just found me out.”

He looked at me kindly and gave me the perfect answer.

“There are costs in life related to who we are.”