Archive for the ‘The Crazy’ Category

The saga of not knowing which neurologist I’m seeing continues.

Before you ask, no, I haven’t called (again) to find out who it is (again) because I just feel like a crazy person being all, hi, uh, I have an appointment on Thursday but, uh, I don’t know which doctor I’m seeing (again). You know? It’s like, I just made an appointment on a whim (oh wait, I did) and normal people don’t do that. I think. It’s hard to say what normal people do, with having absolutely zero frame of reference to speak from.

I totally thought my problem was solved last week. I got a call from You See El Aye to confirm my appointment for this coming week. The message was easily 5 minutes of nonsense, but I knew that there was a precious nugget of information coming because in the past 4 years I’ve gotten about 30,000 of these automatically generated robot calls.

“We are calling to confirm your appointment on Thursday, October 21st at 3pm with”

I sucked in my breath, ready to write the name down.

“your provider.”

Sigh.

Seriously. SERIOUSLY?

I mean come on now.

I’m starting to think that I don’t have an appointment with a real person at all. Or maybe his name is Dr. Your Provider. I didn’t think look that one up. Maybe his (her?) mom was just a really good planner.

I almost don’t want to know at this point. No doctor is going to live up to the mystery and hype of the past 6 and a half weeks of name guessing.

Tonight is one of those nights where I just need to write something out.

I have a clinical rotation coming up later this month. It’s just a two weeker, so compared to the 7 weeks this summer, it’s not a huge deal. All my friends got their placements a few weeks ago and most of them were set up with some really amazing clinics and facilities. Two of them are going to the same place my sister works at (where I’m not allowed to go, unfortunately), others are getting the exact places they requested.

We each had a meeting with the director of clinical education before we created our “wish lists” for this clinical. I told him that I really, desperately want to work in pediatrics. I want to experience NICU and PICU rotations and see a variety of inpatient and outpatient peds settings. I have no doubt that pediatrics is where I am meant to work.

In the meeting I also explained that I have pretty severe strength deficits in my left hand. I don’t go around just shouting that from the rooftop, I only mentioned it because in our field there are settings where I need to be able to physically support the weight of adults by myself and frankly, I don’t feel safe doing it. We have always been encouraged to consider our safety and our patient’s safety first, and I politely expressed concern over that very thing.

The clin ed director was nice, but not concerned with my hand or my safety. If anything, he seemed to want to prove to me that I can work in any setting, hand be damned. Which is a nice thought, but we all have limits and I really think that’s one of mine.

So when I got my placement by email last night I was upset. I’d even say angry.

I didn’t get placed in pediatrics, which is frustrating, but not the end of the world. I have several more clinicals left to go, and there is still time for me to experience pediatrics. But I got placed in pretty much the exact setting I told him I wasn’t comfortable in. And I got placed in my hometown, which wouldn’t be such a big deal except one of the 2 weeks of the clinical is the same time as Slappy’s only remaining week off in 2010. And he really don’t want to vacation at my mom’s house (no offense mom).

But it gets worse.

It turns out that this setting isn’t just tough for my physically, it’s also going to be tough mentally. Because it is an ICU. Which is really something I’d hoped to avoid.

And wait, we’re not done yet.

It’s not just any ICU. It’s the ICU that my grandma died in. It’s in the hospital where I last saw my grandma alive. That hospital. That ICU.

My anger dissolved quickly. Because it wasn’t really anger in the first place. It was fear and it was sadness all along, I just didn’t recognize it.

This setting scares me. The ICU scares me. And visiting one with my class a few weeks ago did not help. If anything, it scared me more. I managed to not hyperventilate or pass out in my 45 minutes there, but I also struggled to do anything except spend the entire time focusing on not hyperventilating and not passing out.

And now I have to do it for two weeks. In the place my grandma died.

It’s just fear on top of fear on top of grief.

And it’s a tough situation because, yes, this would be a great learning experience. And I want to learn, that’s why I devote most of my working non-internet hours to school. I want to be a better clinician, I want to hone my skills and become well rounded. But I feel like there is a finite number of fears I can conquer at once and this is too many.

I can’t seem to collect myself to figure out how to deal with this. How to make this work when it seems so entirely unworkable. How to talk to the director of clin ed and explain my concerns without sounding silly.

I don’t know what to do.

But for the record, crying and worrying hasn’t helped much. Yet.

I’ve studied a lot about human behavior, but mostly physical behavior. I can give you a good idea of why your knee or hip hurts based on the way you walk or the shoes you wear. I can tell you how the body works with almost disturbing precision. It’s what I’ve been training to do, it’s why I’m in school.

But the mind is a mystery to me.

Tomorrow, in my quest to continue to understand the human body, I have to fight with the human mind. My mind, to be precise.

Because tomorrow my class is taking a trip to visit the ICU nearby to observe our role in the acute inpatient setting. We have had lectures on what to expect, what each cord goes to, what each beep and number represents. I can tell you pretty easily what the normal heart rate, respiratory rate and blood pressure are.

But I am terrified of seeing it.

Almost 3 years ago, I spent a day and a night in the ICU. I woke up from brain surgery in an ICU room to a nurse standing next to me, calling my name and telling me to breathe. Because for whatever reason, I kept forgetting to. Things were beeping, I was groggy, tired and scared. My family was there one moment, then I’d fall back to sleep and they would be gone. My now husband, then fiance, was supposed to be able to stay there the whole time (I mean, there has to be some perk of being a medical student at the same hospital, right?), but the nurse wouldn’t let him stay.

I struggled to wake up, to figure out where I was. I couldn’t tell if I was in pain or if I was just expecting to be. And then came the vomit. Except that since I hadn’t eaten anything all day (because of that whole brain surgery thing), I just retched, over and over and over again. I got nausea drugs, then more nausea drugs, and they did nothing. My nurse rolled her eyes at me when I begged, groggily for help, for something else to stop this. In the end, she gave me every nausea drug they had, and it wouldn’t stop.

My father held me hand and cried because there was nothing he could do.

After what felt like an eternity, we got the nurse, who was painfully unconcerned, to call my neurosurgeon to give me something to help me relax. They decided that an incredibly strong anti-psychotic med was the right choice, and to their credit, It worked. But when I woke up, my family was gone. I was alone. I was scared, confused. I didn’t know what time it was, if I was okay, what had happened.

All night I drifted in and out of consciousness, alone, the nurse on the other side of a glass wall that seemed like a mile away.

Finally, it was light outside, and I was able to keep my eyes open, to assess what was going on around me. I had oxygen in my nose, a very painful arterial line in my wrist, two IVs, a catheter and a HUGE bandage on my head. I was in the intensive care unit, because I truly needed intensive care. I was in a pretty severe situation, which up until that moment, I hadn’t even considered or realized.

A few hours later, I was moved to a normal room, with fewer needles and tubes and medications and well, the rest is history. I’ve worked really hard to forget that first day after surgery and tomorrow I’ll have to face it.

Just thinking about it makes my heart race, makes me panic. It’s silly because I’m going to observe tomorrow, I’ll be walking around, not in bed. The tubes won’t be coming from my arms or my face. And yet, I’m still terrified. I feel so unsettled, nervous.

I want to be rational, but this fear is pretty irrational.

I want to be in control, but it is entirely uncontrollable inside my head.

Maybe it’s silly. It’s just a hospital ward. It’s just wires, it’s just tubes.

It’s just scary.

Last week I wrote about the struggles I’ve been having lately with my weight.

It was an extraordinarily hard post to write and even harder to know that others were reading it. But honestly, it helped. For a few days after getting it out of my head, things seemed better, they seemed more manageable.

And really, I think that better-ness would’ve lasted longer if I hadn’t had a lab at school 2 days later where we had to measure our body fat using 3 different methods.

Seriously.

The thing is, my BMI is in the normal range, which should mean that I’m healthy. But you always hear about how BMIs are not accurate for a lot of people, and hey, guess what, I’m one of them. Because though I’m “normal” in terms of body mass, I’m apparently not normal in terms of body fat.

I am overfat.

No really. That’s my official medical label. I have more than a normal amount of body fat. I have several percent more than the upper level of normal for my height, weight and age.

And it was suggested that to normalize myself, to improve my health, I should lose 12 pounds of body fat. But, in doing so, I shouldn’t gain even a single pound of muscle. So, um, yea. Basically I just need to lose 12 pounds. Of fat.

I have been trying to not be so hard on myself, to try to have a better body image, to stop hating my reflection. And well, I really could’ve done without this news.

I watched my classmates, most of which who are in good shape get their body fat percentages. Some as low as 5% (a guy), but almost everyone was well within the normal range.

And then there was me. Adding to the humiliation of being one of the few people not within the normal ranges was the fact that we had to share our scores with our group. Nothing like being the girl who has to admit that she’s overfat to her otherwise really fit group.

I tried really, really hard to shake it off. I laughed about it, I made fun of it. I even made a bet with my friend before the lab that I would have excess body fat, and well, at least I’m getting 10 bucks out of this crappy news. I make jokes, but behind those jokes is me, feeling all the feelings I’ve held back. Feeling the way I did when I was the chubby kid in elementary school. Feeling the way I did when kids made fun of me and called me fat.

When I look in the mirror now, I see those 12 pounds of fat. I see all the ways that I should be better, should be thinner, should be healthier. I see all the ways I’m failing, both in having a health body and in having a healthy mind.

If I was struggling before, I might be drowning now.

While I was in New York (with a good portion of the internet), a lovely lady asked me (mostly kiddingly I’m pretty sure) how I stay “so thin” since I don’t really exercise. I kind of laughed and wasn’t sure what to say.

I mean, how do you tell a virtual stranger that the way you keep your weight down is by periodically starving yourself?

For a while here, I’ve been doing better with my weight issues. I was able to kind of let go for a while, to stop obsessing so much. But I say that I was able to let go knowing that the whole time I was not obsessing I was at a weight I am comfortable with. It’s kind of like an alcoholic feeling like they’re kicking sober ass when they have no access to alcohol.

Either way, things have been better this summer.

And when Slappy and I went to Canada I knew there would be weight gain and to my credit, I let myself enjoy and indulge in food. It was vacation and there were no scales. But there was poutine (which was eh, not a big fan of gravy), pastries, cakes and all kinds of treats. I didn’t eat myself sick, but I didn’t restrict the way I would’ve at home.

And when we got back the scale showed how much I enjoyed those treats. 6 pounds. 6 pounds in 6 days.

I wish I could tell you that I am being patient with myself and realizing that you can’t lose weight on the spot, that I’m not struggling, but I’m not being patient with myself and I am struggling.

I am struggling terribly.

I cannot seem to get this extra weight off. I think about it constantly, I look at myself in the mirror and I am sad, I am upset. I hate what I look like right now. I hate the way my clothes fit and don’t fit. Which is absurd because we’re talking about 4 pounds at this point, not 40. I know people would KILL to be 4 pounds heavier than their preferred weight and I feel terrible being so mentally screwed up about my weight. I know it’s not reasonable, but that doesn’t make it controllable.

I want to be carefree, I want to stop perseverating on the numbers. But more than that, I want to be 4 pounds lighter. I want my clothes to fit perfectly, I want to feel pretty and thin. I want to have a positive body image, but I want to have the body I like more. I want to be thin more than sane.

And that’s how I know that I’m not doing better.

I’m not starving myself, I’m not doing things that are unsafe, I’m no physical risk to myself. But I am not happy. I’m not me. I’m stuck on numbers and appearance, qualities that if any of my friends came to me upset about I would tell them to ignore. I cannot ignore them. I want to, but they weigh too heavily on my mind. To be honest, those 4 pounds are nothing compared to the weight of these worries, of these crazy thoughts about my body, my worth, my appearance.

I feel heavy in every way right now.

As much as I wish it wasn’t true, I’m not ready to handle the emotional and psychological weight right now. I can barely even admit how serious this is, let alone even begin to pretend that I can manage it, I can fix it or seek help for it. I’m not ready yet. I’m sorry.

And so I continue to manage the physical weight instead. And while I promise to manage it safely for my body, it will most certainly be at the expense of my mind.

I know it seems silly to write about something that I want to forget, I know it seems crazy to re-live an event to forget it. But I haven’t been able to get this one out of my mind, I haven’t been able to not think about this, so I’m hoping that writing about it will be the first step in forgetting.

On Tuesday, Slappy and I decided to take the peak-to-peak gondola ride that goes from Blackcomb to Whistler Mountain. It’s an enclosed ski lift that is around 1400 feet up in the air, travels almost 2 miles and lasts for about 11 minutes. The views are nothing short of amazing and everyone recommended it to us.

We bought our lift tickets and rode the chairlift up the Blackcomb side of the two peaks. I was excited to see the mountain, to hike. I was most excited for the view from this acclaimed gondola ride. We got to the boarding house for the peak-to-peak and we stepped into our lift with 2 other couples.

Our gondola left the boarding area and the view was breathtaking, and all the other passengers in our gondola oohed and aahed.

And I freaked out.

At least, that’s the nicest way I can describe what happened.

With no warning I suddenly felt motion sick. I was nauseated, I was sweating, I wasn’t breathing. I was trapped in a bubble with my husband and 4 other people, thousands of feet in the air for at least 10 more minutes and there was nothing I could do about it. I panicked.

I realize that nothing about that sounds particularly terrifying, except for maybe the height. But I wasn’t afraid of falling or crashing or dying. I wasn’t scared for my life.

I know it sounds silly, but I was scared of throwing up. I know, no one likes to throw up and everyone thinks they understand what I’m saying, but this goes much farther than just dislike. I have anxiety attacks, with fair regularity, purely about the idea of vomiting. I wake up terrified in the middle of the night over it. I carry bags around with me just in case, even though I haven’t had occasion to use one since I was 10. I have pills that I absolutely require to get me out of an anxiety attack- one that is almost always initiated by a stomach ache, or by finding out that someone near me is sick.

My single greatest fear in life is throwing up.

I don’t expect anyone to really understand this, because it’s completely illogical. Typing it out makes me feel silly because it’s ridiculous. I will not die from throwing up. I will not suffer (much) from it. And logically, I know this.

But anxiety knows no logic.

And on Tuesday I was a mile above the ground in a small bubble with 4 other people, and I was about to throw up. As soon as I realized what was happened, I took the pills I had stored in my pocket. All 5 of them at once. I waited for them to take effect, for my heart to calm, for my stomach to settle.

Nothing changed.

I physically could not calm myself down. I couldn’t see past the moment I was in, the situation I was in. The small room that I was going to throw up in.

My heart was racing, my whole body was shaking. I was deeper into any panic attack than I have ever been before. And to make matters worse, the 2 other couples were trying to distract me and all I really wanted was to be left alone. To cry, to freak out. To not have people watching this.

In the last few minutes of the ride I finally began to feel more in control. I still felt like I was going to be sick and I was just praying that we could get off the gondola first. I was embarrassed, I was ashamed. I felt like I had been completely defeated. I couldn’t calm myself down, I couldn’t even control myself with the help of medication.

And worse, I know that I ruined that trip, that adventure for my husband, and for the 4 other people who had to watch my breakdown. (One of the couples got off the gondola and thanked me for not puking, I swear).

Sometimes I feel like I can kick this fear. Sometimes I feel totally rational and see how crazy I am. To be honest, It’s been a long time since I’ve had an anxiety attack that even held a small candle to this one. I have been doing pretty well. But then Tuesday came.

And I’m just tired now. I’m tired of experiences like that, which call into doubt my ability to manage my own life. I’m tired of realizing how controlled I am by my fear. I’m tired of needing pharmaceuticals to help me to breathe, to keep my heart rate from sky-rocketing above 200 beats in a minute.

I have fought this fear for 15 years now. I have had good days, good weeks, good years even. And I have had ones like Tuesday.

Somewhere nearly a mile above the ground in a gondola I realized that I need help. I clearly cannot do this alone. I cannot live like this. I cannot ruin vacations. I cannot plan for every possible anxiety trigger every day.

I’m tired. I need help.

And I’m calling someone for it on Monday.

I’ve never really hesitated to talk about much here. I don’t discuss a lot about my marriage, I don’t give a lot of names or really specific descriptions, but otherwise, I lay most of it out here for you. But there is one thing I haven’t ever really written about. I’ve tried a few times, but words just failed and then escaped me.

I’ve had anxiety since I was about 12. I struggled for a few weeks in junior high with it, and one day the panic and worries just vanished. I didn’t do anything, I didn’t have a life revelation or suddenly learn how to manage my worries, it just got better. And I never really thought I’d have to deal with them again. Then, my senior year of college, the anxiety came back full force.

And it has never left.

Anxiety rules a fair amount of my life even now, 6 full years since the last flood of panic began. I still carry medication with me wherever I go, I still plan exits from events, from family gatherings, from days with friends. I still plan my life around anxiety each and every day.

If you’ve never had a panic attack, I can scarcely begin to explain it to you. It’s as if all of a sudden, you have no idea what’s going on. Your heart races, or sometimes slows down, cold sweat breaks out all over your body and whatever fear you may have had in the moment before the attack began, is now front and center, a huge elephant just waiting to knock you out. It goes from being a little worry to being a HUGE MONSTER scary thing.

When I have anxiety attacks, I always feel like I’m going to throw up. I always feel like I might pass out. And I always lose sense of what is reasonable and what is completely unrealistic. There are times when I honestly feel like I might die. When I think my heart is either going to beat so fast it’s going to explode, or it’s going to beat so slow it’ll just stop. And even though I know that there’s nothing wrong with my heart, that this is all in my head, it doesn’t matter. In that moment, I feel like the anxiety could kill me.

Before I really had anxiety, I always thought people were exaggerating. It always seemed so crazy that someone could be afraid of closed rooms or totally innocuous situations. It didn’t make any sense that people would rearrange their life for their fears, especially for irrational ones.

And then I felt that fear.

Then it gripped me by the throat, by the stomach. It took away all of my ability to reason my way out of things. It took another little slice of the control in my life. I can’t control my mind. I can’t stop my heart from pounding or slowing, I can’t keep my vision from going into a dark tunnel, from my body from shaking violently. Frankly, I can’t control a damn thing once anxiety sets in.

As much as I hate it, the only way I’ve ever been able to come out of an attack, to recover from the vice grip that anxiety has on my life, is with medication. I talk about it as if it doesn’t bother me, as if it’s nothing at all now, but it’s a lie. I hate taking pills. I hate that I can’t manage my fears, that I can’t bring myself out a panic without a prescription. I hate that I’ve dealt with this for years and I’m not getting better. That’s the worst part. If there was an end in sight, it might be bearable.

But there isn’t. And I’ve mostly come to terms with that.

I know that this is likely just the way my life will be. And I live in spite of my anxiety, but I don’t live the way I want to. I don’t get to be carefree. I spent hours thinking about worst case scenarios. I cannot ever just shut my brain down, or be relaxed, even on vacation, even when there shouldn’t be anything to worry about. Because that’s the way anxiety is. It’s not rational, it’s not about reality, it’s about fear. It’s about the things you cannot control. And worst of all, anxiety feeds on itself. Once you have a bout or an attack, you start to worry about having another and usually, that’s all it takes and once you have two in short period of time, the fear of having another is even more heightened than it was before.

Because anxiety isn’t just fear. It isn’t just worries and concerns.

It’s life changing fear.

It’s dream shattering worries.

It’s breath taking panic.

Anxiety isn’t just feeling or being scared, it’s being scared to feel, to be at all.

On my first day of my clinical rotation, I was speaking with a patient, an older man, who was just hilarious. I asked him a little about his family, he answered and then turned and asked the same question. I replied that I had no children, but had been married for two years.

He looked at me and said, “Two years and no kids? What are you doing? You’re just lazy.”

He was kidding, of course, and we had a good laugh. I wondered if he could hear my biological clock ticking the whole time. Because dude.

tick tock tick tock Tick Tock TICK TOCK TICK TOCK TICK FREAKING TOCK TICK ARE YOU LISTENING TO ME TOOOOOOCK

Or maybe I’m giving off baby wanting pheromones or something. I’m not sure.

This whole baby fever thing has been helped considerably by spending all weekend with three adorable babies.

I mean really, how can you resist these eyes? And attitude, I mean really.

And these CHEEKS!?

And well, I didn’t manage to get a single focused picture of Gigi this weekend, but rest assured, the kid is freaking adorable too. The first day we were there she toddled over to me and reached her arms up for me to pick her up. My heart just melted into a tiny puddle.

So it shouldn’t come as a great surprise to me that all I dreamed about last night was being pregnant (which I am tragically not). I dreamed I was, and then wasn’t, and then was again. In the end, just before I woke up, I was celebrating with my family and internets, I was THRILLED. So waking up was sort of a let down.

I know that now is not the time for me to have children. I know I am not in a position emotionally, physically or financially to care for another human being besides my husband. I know that I need to finish school because, fun fact: it’s not free.

But being (slightly) in touch with reality does not seem to do anything for the desire to have a baby right now right now rightnow.

I guess it’s just a good thing that my birth control is REALLY tough to sabotage.

I mean, not that I would do that but, well, I’d totally consider doing that.

It’s been 3 days shy of a month since I sat at this computer and admitted that I have a problem. I don’t know what I expected to happen after that day. I had already told my husband I would see a therapist. I had already told him I was doing better.

Well, I didn’t. And better is a very relative term.

I’m eating enough calories now. I’m still losing a little weight, but not at an alarming or unhealthy rate. Just enough to keep giving me that little exhilaration of success, of control. Just enough to keep giving me that hit of my mental addiction that I need to make it through the day.

My eating may have improved, but the mental side of this remains unchanged. I can’t talk to anyone about it, or I guess, it’s not an inability, it’s just that I don’t want to. I feel alarmingly alone, even though I have people on all sides of me, offering me a rope to climb out of this hole. Even though I have people who are willing to build me a ladder to get out.

The truth is, I like this hole.

I like that I’m doing something successfully. And I like the way my body is starting to look. And I know how incredibly fucked up that sounds. I really do.

I make jokes about having an eating disorder with some people who know. I make jokes about being a control freak all the time. But it’s not really a joke. It’s serious, and I know that. But I’m still not able, not willing, to face it.

It’s easy for people who are outside of this to sit aside and say, hey, this girl needs therapy. This girl needs a trained professional to help her. She needs to realize that she’s hurting herself, even if not physically, then mentally and emotionally. This girl needs someone to help her find a healthier way to find control, or a strategy to give up control altogether.

It’s easy to be an observer on this life.

But it’s not easy to live it.

I don’t want to go to therapy. I don’t like to talk about this, at all. I don’t like to talk, aloud, about the things I’m doing wrong, about how I am not normal, not right. I don’t want to sit in a room and try to dissect why I am the way I am. I don’t want to tell another person that I need help, I don’t want to admit that I’m not okay, out loud, to someone who doesn’t know me. To be honest, I can’t even say it out loud to people who know me well.

I don’t want help.

But I need help.

I knew I needed help when I finished my birthday dinner and worried, unreasonably, about how much weight I had gained in one day. On my birthday. I knew I needed help when I was willing to skip out on eating a cupcake that my sister and I baked last weekend because I had already eaten more for lunch than I had planned in my head. I knew I needed help when I stepped on the scale and felt crushed because I had gained back .6 pounds.

.6 pounds should not ruin a day. Birthdays should not be a time for thinking about weight. A cupcake should not cause mental distress.

I know this. I know all of this. And if it was as easy as knowing, then I wouldn’t be typing this at all.

I know I need help, but more than that, I know I don’t want it. I don’t want to talk about it, I don’t want to think about it. I don’t want to sit for hours having another person dissect my life, my brain, my problems.

I don’t know where I’ll go from here. I don’t know the next chapter in this story. I just know that it’s only just begun. I know that the resolution won’t be quick, and it won’t be easy. I know it will involve tears and that it will involve time.

And I know at some point, it will involve help.

But not today. Not yet.

This morning my hair straightener broke. It wasn’t that big of a deal, but it meant I couldn’t wear my hair down today because it was tumbleweed sized and the curling iron couldn’t start to tame it. So I pulled it up into the worlds tiniest ponytail and turned around to see the back. To my surprise for the first time in a few years, the scar on the back of my head was plainly visible.

And more surprisingly, for the first time in a long time, I was self-conscious about it. I was genuinely worried that people might comment, or stare. That it would be noticeable again.

It’s no secret that I have some substantial scars. I have the one on my head, the one on my breast, a couple of good ones on my arms, a few on my legs. My skin is marked with experience in the very same way that my spirit is.

You can’t see all the scars on the inside, but on weeks like this one, they seem to show a little clearer.

I have a scar in my memory from the last time I went to a therapist for anorexia and she told me I wasn’t that thin.

I have scars in my memory from the last time I recovered from not eating by gaining all the weight, and then some, back.

I have scars in my memory from the pain of admitting my problems, time and time again.

I have scars in my memory from all sorts of things I wish had never happened. Many of which were my own doing.

My mind feels raw with its wounds right now, my spirit cracked in more places that it’s solidly together. I am trying to let them heal, to take care of myself and to find my way back to normal, but it’s a struggle. It seems like every time I start to heal in one place, something else breaks.

I feel exposed right now, like all my flaws are on show. It makes me feel even less in control of my life, which really makes everything worse.

It’s amazing how just this morning I found myself worried about what people would think of the scar on my neck, of how they would react if they saw it. And then I realized that it wasn’t really about that scar at all, it was about all my wounds and imperfections.

It was about how worried I am that people might see what’s really going on and how that might change everything.