You are currently browsing the monthly archive for May, 2008.
Maybe I’ve been spending too much time with early teenagers lately, but I’ve had a lot of thoughts rumbling through my head lately that sound way too much like my journal from 1990. When you’re in the middle of that teenage angst, there’s always any number of adults around telling you that it will all make sense one day. That eventually you will be at peace with yourself. That “this, too, will pass”.
And they do. I see now from my vantage point of 31 (Wow…31? Really?) that perspective comes only with experience. I wrote in my journal the other day that sometimes I want to “crawl into my 12 year old skin”. It’s not that I really want to live through those days again. It’s just that I miss the simplicity of knowing my daily goal was to learn how to solve equations and the gross domestic product of Brazil, to write some notes to friends, to watch my favorite t.v. shows, and go to sleep knowing that my life was just one great big bundle of possibilities.
I miss the possibilities. They’ve been long buried under bills to pay and dishes to wash and relationships to mend. I feel sometimes like I’m just duct taped together, trying to make it through one more 24 hour period.
At 12, I could be anything I wanted to be. At 31, I can’t be anything. I’m too old and too married to be a Cosmo girl. I’m too kidless to be part of the trendy, family crowd. I’m too young to be eccentric. I’m too broke to completely follow my heart. This is a worse “tween” feeling than those precarious teenage years.
I guess I’d really hoped I’d have found my place in this world by now. I thought I’d be a mom and a wife and a writer. Instead, I feel stuck and stagnant, caught between the winds of desperation and fear. My head is rumbling. My heart is beating. My soul is blank.
And I just don’t know.
I made a deal with myself last week that if I could eat clean Monday through Friday, I would buy myself Urban Decay’s Deviant eyeliner. I could barely contain myself as I ran into Ulta and straight for the Urban Decay display. This stuff is electric blue with just the right hint of glitter, and I really want to just color my entire body with it or inject it directly into my veins. I am so in love with this eyeliner right now. My sweetie says I’m only a frayed jean skirt and can of hairspray away from 1987.
That’s okay with me; I kind of liked that year.
I was so impressed by my last post that I shared it with my grandmother who immediately said, “Just remember to hold on to that faith when bad things happen.” That was fair enough, and I’ve been through enough rough moments in my life to know there’s always something waiting around the bend with the potential to shake my core.
Little did I know just how quickly it would rear its ugly head. A few years ago I first noticed a weird little scar on my back. I have no recollection of how I got it. It just suddenly was there. The only spot on my very red, sunburned back. I never thought much of it until I went to the dermatologist a few weeks ago.
Names have an interesting way of taking over. Until the doctor spoke the word, I didn’t think of the spot as anything more than an entity named Bob or Herman or Frankie with a made up a story about how we met up during our time in the Peace Corp in Bolivia. No such luck for me.
It turns out that my weird little scar is actually vitiligo. This just means that I’m losing skin pigment in parts of my body. You can go ahead and breathe now if you thought I was about to share something life-threatening. This isn’t fatal, but it is crushing to my fragile sense of self, especially when I noticed some white spots on my arm. And hand. And the bottom of my illiopsoas.
So please forgive me for my lack of presence online for the last week. My mind has been completely occupied with the pounding sounds of , “VITILIGO! VITILIGO! VITILIGO!” This is accompanied by obsessive images of patchwork skin, questions about whether or not I can ever show my face in the public again, and a worry or two thousand that my husband won’t think I’m just as beautiful as I am now.
In between these crazy moments, I’ve journaled. I’ve prayed. I’ve screamed to God. I’ve cried until my chest ached. I’ve completely switched to a gluten-free diet and put myself on a daily regimine consisting of a butt-load of vitamins and mini yoga sessions. Vitiligo appears to be an autoimmune disease, so I’m pulling out everything in my arsenal to build my immune system. There is always the chance these “reverse freckles” will re-pigment.
Just around the bend.
My heart aches.
My faith is still unshaken.
