What A Life! #FTSF #SoCS

“What a life!” my oma would always say with a sigh.

She was right. I say it now, that line, in exasperation, and in my memory of her, to honour her unique brand of wisdom and her straightforward ability to speak the truth.

I just had a checkup with a nurse practitioner. She was very thorough and we talked for what felt like a very long time. No rush to see me briefly and get me out the door. No neglect of what I needed. I told her my entire history, as fast as I possibly could, but she did not want me to hurry through the details. She was wonderful.

It takes me a little while to get through my somewhat complex medical history. I had her curious and eager to look up my eye condition

and the rare syndrome I share with my brother.

This took me back, which it can most often do, and required that I look back over the years.

Mostly I spoke of how sick I was before my then gp finally diagnosed my end-stage kidney failure at age twelve. That sure took me back, into the bad and the worse in terms of memories and recollections. I told her how hard it becomes to remember to include all necessary details, with every retelling I give a doctor or nurse. She was very understanding.

I see how far I’ve come when I look back, using my medical story as the example. I reflect on the girl I was and the struggles in the following years. I want to think I am doing alright considering. I think of my oma and I leave my medical checkup and I sigh.

When it comes to the years, I do so much looking back that it is sometimes a heavy weight on my shoulders.

I like the romantic notion of the days of yore. I read such fairy tales, but life is never like those stories in literature in reality. People reminisce about how it used to be, but perhaps, just perhaps they are remembering a time that never actually existed.

That may come across, to you, if you’re only just hearing me for the first time, as a highly pessimistic slant to life. Perhaps. Your take on, say the last twenty years of your own life, it could very well be all rosy coloured and tinted through different glasses. I haven’t worn glasses since 1996 I’m afraid.

No self pity here, but my life isn’t now or never has been a fairy tale anyway. Just the sort of telling it like it is/was, just like my oma used to like to do. That’s about as stream of consciousness as I can get today.

There is thankfulness to be had here, (which will for sure include that wonderful nurse), of course, but that is still to come in my next post.

🙂

I’m doing a double linkup this weekend, starting with

Finding Ninee’s Finish The Sentence Friday,

followed by

Linda G Hill’s Stream of Consciousness Saturday.

After the Scars

All Twitter wars aside (planned or not), Taylor Swift sure can come up with some poignant and universal lyrics about love and relationships:

“It’ll leave you breathless or with a nasty scar.”

It’s either one or the other, usually in that order.

The above song lyric about what it feels like to fall, be, or survive the pitfalls of love are all I was hoping to say when I wrote

One Last Kiss.

I am used to scars. I have had them since I was twelve years of age, and I would go on accumulating scar after scar through my teenage years.

These were physical scars. They were unwanted and yet I began to collect them with pride because they were real representations of the medical traumas I had suffered and survived. Every one of those times I went under anesthetic and awoke to recover once more I was proud of that fact.

It’s handy when a scar can be kept secret under clothing. As I took on more and more surgical scars, this became harder and harder to accomplish.

Soon the teenager in me became much too self-aware and I never would have considered wearing a bikini, which would have meant I would have had no other choice but to show off my abdominal scars.

Sure, I say I was proud, but I still couldn’t do it. I’d heard too much about the lengths people went to hide their scars, including more surgeries. This always seemed ridiculous to me.

I couldn’t hide the long scar I had running up the centre of my back either. I couldn’t hide any of them really, so why bother?

It became an exercise in futility, both exhausting and fruitless.

Physical scars are permanent reminders of my medical history, but I would soon start picking up scars of a different kind, along the way to adulthood.

It’s these emotional and psychological scars, invisible no matter what I might be wearing, that I keep taking on as the years come and go. They are much easier to hide in plain sight, but they heal much slower, feeling like they could split wide open at any moment.

It’s these scars I found it impossible not to use as the basis for the short story I wrote last fall, but I had no idea, then, about a project soon to be in the works. This collection of stories would be called

After The Scars: A Second Chances Anthology

It seemed the perfect place, a perfect fit for the story I had needed to tell. Love had given me enough scars, emotional scars this time, to rival the scar tissue I had on my body.

I gather these invisible scars, along with my physical ones, and I hope both kinds will make me stronger. They carry some shame and some embarrassment along with them, of which I struggle sometimes to live with, but they are reminders I will keep with me always.

It’s hard to open myself up, to someone, to anyone. It’s hard to let them see that I do, in deed, possess both types of scars. It’s a risk and I sometimes fear I won’t be able to accept that, but I do. What else is there?

Love and life carry with them both the good and the bad. Love can do both things Swift sings about in “Blank Space”.

Love can take your breath away with its intensity. Then, you can walk away from such intensity, marked by the emotional scars that remain.

The universal truth of this astounds me every day. That is what gave me the fuel to write my story and that is what will likely always have a place at the heart of any story I write going forward.

I wear both classifications of scar with pride, as I declare here first.

Won’t you join me?