Yesterday, as I stepped out of my car at the end of the day, I looked up at the sky and saw all those stars. There seemed, (at least to me) to be more than usual and I wondered about that. I wondered how there got to be so many stars. Then I wondered about myself.
I recently saw a video about a girl who had been in a plane crash. She was badly disfigured but had survived the crash. After months of being first in a coma, then in an intensive care recovery unit, she was able to regain most of the use of her body. She had been so badly burned that her face was unrecognizable after the crash. The thing that caught my attention about this was that she made the comment, “I am not my body.”
While I was growing up, I was my body. It's deficiencies, quirks, foibles and failings were the obvious targets of ridicule for those who knew me best. I defined my existence by moments of public shame and disapproval and spent a great deal of worry and care trying to change my looks to avoid those moments. When I was 14 our family moved to a town that was the rival of the town where we came from. Arch-enemies would not be too harsh a term for the feelings the two schools had for each other. I spent the next four years as the brunt of every joke, the excuse for every prank and the object of ridicule to vent feelings about the rival school.
I was only too glad to graduate and move on to another place. As it happened, nature designed that I should inherit the condition of boils and in my case, those boils showed up just after I turned 18 and went to college. I had looked forward with great anticipation to the day when I could go to college. There, I thought, I could leave behind the preconceived notions that had been formed about me over the years. I could leave behind the nasty nick-names, bad jokes and a whole host of epithets I had lived with. I wished to start fresh, with people who didn't know me or my past, and make a life that would be more bearable.
The day I arrived on campus I felt the first boil forming under the skin on my face. When I was a teenager, I had had almost no trouble with acne. My face was as clear as the day I was born. So when that first boil appeared I was not prepared for the result. After a couple of weeks, my face was covered with boils, each the size of a quarter and as sore as if someone had punched me in the face. Boils, I discovered, do not behave like acne. What I thought would be a short battle with a small sore became a two year struggle for survival. Each sore represented a month of pain, swelling and finally healing. I never had less than several sores on my face at all times and when a sore would heal it would leave a giant pock mark in it's place. As often as I could when I was in class, I kept my hands over my face out because of self-consciousness. When I would walk to class people would look at me and then look quickly away. Sometimes they could not repress a verbal reaction and would say something like, “Eeyuuuu!”
The day I knew that I was not my body was on a day when I was trying one of the many remedies that people had suggested for my condition. I was washing my face and putting on some special treatment when my roommate came in with her boyfriend. They sat on the couch talking and I briefly overheard their conversation. The boy laughed and, among other things, said that he pitied the man who married me, if I ever got married. I looked into the mirror and saw the thing that the boy was talking about, my face. “But that is not me!” I thought. “He doesn't even know who I am. He thinks I am my body. I am not. I am something else altogether.”
No amount of boils or blemishes can change who I am. And the stars, the earth, the trees, the air, the animals and the people are all more than we can see. I only have to look into the mirror or look at the night sky or into the eyes of another human being to know that. And when I know that, it's like seeing everything for the first time. And everything really is beautiful.
My first thought the first time I saw you was not about your acne - It was I need to have you as my friend. When I think back to how you look in my memory (and I'm really trying to right now) I still do not see them. I remember seeing them later when we became friends, but just thinking how painful they must be. And I always knew that you would marry someone as wonderful as you were, because you wouldn't settle for anything less.
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