5 on a Friday
I got another tattoo. Inked into my flesh on my upper thigh, a reminder of the girl I used to be. A visual representation of that hospital bed, of the cartoons I spent hours watching and the teddy bears that distracted me from the realities of growing up in a medically fragile body. It's a monument to her, to me, to how we almost didn’t survive. We did and we almost didn’t. I feel so separate from that girl most days. My life bears a distinct split mark - the before transplant and the after transplant. Each girl carries a different way about her, a difference in her appearance, a different name. In fact we’re probably more different than we are alike. And yet I carry her with me. Her journey got me to where I am today. When I think of that younger version of me, I don’t think of her as having grown up, even though I know we did. I think of her, instead, as locked in liminal space, perpetually playing with teddy bears.
I view tattoos as a somatic practice. this new tattoo is not my first, so i have an idea of how my body responds. And one of the first things I noticed in my healing was my body lagged behind a little bit, similar to how it does when I’m in a POTS flare. My heart rate got higher, my sleep was less, there was an underlying level of stress constantly present in my body. My initial reaction was to brace against it. “Fight” the symptoms with protocols and treatment plans. Hydrating and workouts are great, but I was using them to try and extract something from my body. I realized these symptoms that registered in my being as fear was actually my body doing her job. I did all the right things - I’d gotten labs before my appointment, I’d been stable for weeks, I was balancing the things I know my body actually needs to stay healthy. And this was to be expected. And because I did all the right things, I could trust this was temporary and I’d bounce back. I needed to give my body time to rest and integrate and heal
I’m doing fantastic. The latest medical report, the one documenting every detail of my transplant, the story told by red blood in a vial as if my life can be quantified by metrics and lab reports, says. The truth feels easier to digest on a cellular level than it does on an emotional one. I’ve integrated flawlessly, and in my body there is very little difference in what is mine and what is not mine. We’ve adapted, resilient little thing. I’ve spent so much of my life fighting that ease feels unnerving.
There’s a certain weight that comes with holding people’s stories. I’ve felt it every time I stand close enough to another person to feel the reverberation of their trauma. I’ve seen the best moments of someone’s life, and I’ve also been the first call after it all ends. It’s such a precocious line to walk. And it’s not something I take for granted, and it doesn’t mean I don’t love the work I do, and the opportunities it has afforded me to sit inside of people’s stories. I guess its just a poetic way of trying to say I lost someone recently, and in this parallel universe of transplantation where we live awkwardly nestled inside one another’s stories it feels different and weird in my body, and shines a light on some things I haven’t looked at recently or at all. Maybe writing it down is my way of reminding me of my own humanity, even as I spend so much time holding the humanity of others. We belong to each other.
I’ve started (again) trying to work with my natural hair. Post transplant my hair was really curly, and with life it just became easier to throw it up or straighten it versus actually figuring out a routine that worked for my hair. It’s still really wavy, and I’ve been curious if I lean into my natural texture if I can bring it back. This ties into so many ways I use hair as a metaphor, into societal beauty standards for women (especially how these intersect with racism and beauty standards as a white woman). It fits into a deeper story of loving the body I’m in even when some things make me uncomfortable. It’s hard to sit in the messy middle. I said that to a client this week, and I wasn’t talking about hair. It’s hard to be in something you wish was better or different, to feel uncomfortable, and to find yourself in that. So yeah, I guess this is hair as a metaphor, again.
