Come Alive
This week is organ transplant awareness month. It’s the final week of April, which is donate life month, and I’ve been having hard and meaningful conversations all month.
Recently I’ve had moments where I look myself in the mirror and wonder “who is she?” about the girl staring back at me. Because I’m not the same person I was before transplant. And I’m not just talking physically. Every single thing about me is different from how I walk, how I talk, how I think, how I take up space and exist in the world. And I’ve been encountering a lot of people who knew who I was, but they don’t know who I am. I know its hard for them, too, to lose me, even though I’m right here. And it’s resisting the urge to shrink back into who I was and play a part to make people comfortable.
I used to sit with death energy, now I play with life. Everything around me is reflecting that work of coming alive, from the cycles of nature to my inner cycles. And it’s something a lot of people don’t understand. It’s something I don’t even understand some days.
Transplant is becoming one of the less interesting things about me. And there are days, weeks even, I forget I even had a transplant. Because my life isn’t hallmarked by sickness anymore.
I was on the phone with someone a while ago and my transplant came up, and I could hear the shock in this person’s voice. It was almost a layer of doubt and disbelief that I was so ok. I was ranting about it later and I said, “It’s probably just because X person has never met me. They only know me from the phone and written information. If they met me, they’d know how alive I am.”
I get it, my files look really harrowing. Just based on sheer data and facts, its easy to lack the comprehension on how someone who survived all that would be fine, physically or emotionally. And sometimes it makes me angry to have other people be slower to accept my life than I am. I have to remember they didn’t live it. I don’t think you can understand the power of resurrection until you live it. Know it. Taste the juices and gnaw on the flesh of it.
Yes there are hard days, physically and emotionally. Insanely hard. I’m learning to hold both. I spoke to a goup of transplant recipients this last week and I said “You can’t be afraid of the very thing you were saved for”
As in this life is hard but you’ve got to live it. As in eventually you have to accept the ups and downs are just life, and waiting on the sidelines to get in the game until it looks easy enough isn’t what you came here to do.
I think people are uncomfortable with the level of aliveness I’ve achieved. They expect me to still be kin to death. They don’t understand the sacred act of being alive.
Do you? Do you understand the guts and bones and fibres and stringy intestinal bits of aliveness? Do you understand resurrection power?
The old thing is gone. the new thing is here. There is no going back to the old thing, it ceased to exist.
