reminders of hope
It’s Friday afternoon, and I’m sitting on my bed as it sits perched right in the middle of my bedroom. I’m rearranging the furniture - a task my husband and I started before he left for work this morning, and one I’m determined to finish before he gets home. The entire room has been flipped, and it’s the same but different.
This morning, as I sat on the couch with my first cup of coffee I saw a hair salon I follow on instagram had an opening for later that morning. Without thinking I messaged the salon asking if the slot was still open - it was - and a few hours later I walked into the hair salon with no idea what I wanted done, only knowing that I needed a change.
As my husband and I moved the bed this morning we found cornstarch stains in the carpet, and for a split second my breath caught in my throat. Reminders of an old life. The last time we’d rearranged the furniture in our bedroom had been two years prior, in the months before my transplant. We’d painted the walls since then, but had moved around the furniture rather than moving it to a new location.
I remember because somewhere under this blue green paint are words I scrawled on with shaky handwriting and some leftover black paint I had from a project: HOPE LIVES HERE. I’d written it then because I needed to believe in better things when it felt like everything was falling apart. Our bed will now sit against the same wall where I wrote those words, and when I touch the wall I can almost feel the raised mark of those letters I wrote in a frantic effort to believe them. I wrote them in the spring, and by the end of summer I had recieved my new liver.
As my hairstylist was mixing up the dye today, pulling the formula from the depths of the records, I wondered when the last time I’d had my hair this color was. I didn’t even remember what color it was, nor did I care in that exact moment. It took until the appointment was nearly over for me to remember: It was November 2021. I’d got my hair done in the morning, dragging myself to the salon while feeling terrible and in the middle of days upon days of pain, and that night I ended up in the ER, and only a few days later I’d recieve a bile duct surgery that ended up being the one that worked. I haven’t had any incidences since then, and in fact my labs now show not only am I healthy for a transplant recipient but I am extremely healthy for anyone.
Both of these things, funny enough, happened a very short time before the breakthrough actually happened. And when both of these things happened, I felt absolutely hopeless and convinced it was never going to get better for me.
I dyed my hair, and rearranged my room, because I feel like I’ve been running into so many endings lately I desperately need a fresh start. I need something new, something I can look at and say “this has changed. this isn’t the way it was before.” I need a physical response to a deep, emotional shift.
I’ve been calling this phase of my life ‘rebuilding normal.’ For so long my entire life was dictated by my health, and waiting for a transplant, and then the survival focused state that is healing from major surgery. And I don’t know if I expected things to be easier, but I’m continually surprised by how hard it is. It should be easy, right? The hard part should be over?
Instead, for the last number of weeks, I’ve been waking up every morning with the pit in my stomach of “I don’t know if I can do this. I don’t know how to hold on to faith, to keep hoping, to walk away from something because there is no option that doesn’t end in heartbreak.”
I’ve met myself with a mixture of tough love (it’s not like you have another choice. What else are you going to do?) and the reminder that I’ve done this all before. The situations look different but the internal reactions are the same. I’ve also realized I thrive when my life is in absolute shambles. Promises come true in the wilderness, and with all the time I’ve spent in the wilderness returning to it is like running my fingers over a familiar groove.
Ah, yes, here it is. I remember this. I remember this hard but I also remember being met here.
I did things today because I needed something to change. I’m realizing what has changed this entire time was me. I was talking to a friend once and she said what we think of as going around in circles is sometimes spiraling up. We get better every time, we apply what we learned, we heal deeper. And I’m seeing as I do this, again, that my reflex to trust has kicked in faster than the time before. I’m quicker to offer up the pieces of my broken heart, and to lean in to what I know brings healing. And when things seem hopeless, I remind myself hope lives here. Miracles happen here. I wrote both those things into the framework of our home, and they still are true.
I don’t know what happens next. Right now things seem confusing and dark and messy. What do you do when you’re almost there, it’s almost happening, and then things fall apart? When you’re standing in the wreckage, being called to move in a way that seems directly opposite of thr dream you’ve held for so long, saying “this was supposed to be it.”
But I’ve been here before. In the ‘I don’t know what happens next’ that unfolds into ‘this is the next right part of my story’.
And what was true then is still true now. Unintentionally, I was reminding myself of it all along.
HOPE LIVES HERE