The January Visual Verse challenge is up and running, in some very interesting directions. You can submit until the 15th!!!
My contribution came out today. If you are interested, you can read it here.
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I feel sad this morning. It isn’t new, feeling sad and writing about sadness; I do that a lot. But, today it isn’t just sadness, or darkness or blindness, that is in my head and on my skin, it is shame. I have written about shame before, in regard to my disease and feeling different, but the shame I feel today has nothing to do with RP; it came long before blindness.
Continue reading “Stuck in the Escape”
I have been feeling incredibly defeated since a recent family gathering. Defeated by my inadequacies, by my failing sight and my 40 extra pounds. I have been abandoning myself, night after night, to the comforts of Cabernet and waiting to feel a sparkle again, or at least a bit of a shimmer. Today is not that day.
I was working out at home this afternoon, like I do most days of the week. I have a dance DVD that I particularly like and after some kickboxing, I decided to get my groove on a bit with the dance workout. During the first segment, I did a bit of a spastic leap, landed strangely, twisted my ankle and fell. I just sat there on the floor, sobbing and dissolving into waves of self loathing. I felt so broken. I felt like a failure; an uncoordinated, over weight failure.
I was devastated to discover yet another thing that I would never be very good at or that I would have to take extra care doing because of the damn RP. I know it sounds like I have a bit of a fatalistic attitude, but I arrived at this injury already feeling so broken and useless that it didn’t take much to send me over an emotional edge. Most of the time, I do maneuver through my disease with a certain amount of strength and a refusal to let it beat me, but sometimes the reminders of how RP makes me vulnerable feel like too much to bear.
For a fleeting moment, while I was dancing, I felt free from myself and from my blindness. I let my guard down and felt a clarity of body and motion and then I stepped off into the abyss that is my deteriorating vision, slammed back into the reality of my disease and crashed to the ground. I had forgotten for a moment that I can’t just dance without thinking of the constant threat presented by obstacles that seemingly pop up out of nowhere. I can’t be free in my body because my motion is chained to my blindness.
I know that this is how I feel just in this moment and how I will probably feel the next time I fall. But, I will also remember those fleeting seconds when I was dancing and I felt free. It is that feeling of freedom that will lead me to brush the tears of defeat from my cheeks and to dance again.
Whenever a person discovers something about themselves as an adult that has been present or growing since childhood, they inevitably think about the signs they may have missed; things that would have tipped them off sooner, given them a clue to the journey ahead.
A few months ago, I was going through some old photos from when I was a small child. I came across a picture that was taken on a beach in Mexico when I was about three years old. My eyes were squinted against the glare of the sun and I was reaching for a pair of sunglasses that were perched on a rock nearby. I looked desperate to escape the bright sunlight and it is a look I recognize. Growing up in California, my family was always going to the beach and wanting to bask in the sun, but I always preferred the cloudy days. They all thought I was strange or moody, but even then, the sun actually hurt my eyes.
As I got older, I was called clumsy because I was always tripping and stubbing my toes and knocking things over. I couldn’t hit a softball in P.E. class or catch the ball when I was forced into the outfield. I appeared careless, unathletic, always in a day-dream, but I was actually going blind.
When I was learning to drive, I remember being in the car one afternoon with my mom, who began shrieking that I was driving too close to the edge of the road and that we were going to go off the cliff. My mom was prone to drama and there wasn’t really a cliff, just a five-inch drop off the road into the dirt. She thought I wasn’t paying attention, but I actually couldn’t see the side of the road.
Into my 20’s I continued to trip and fall and live up to my reputation as either the clumsy day dreamer or the girl who has had too much to drink. I had a friend tell me I was the only 24-year-old she knew who actually fell down and skinned her knees. I missed curbs and crashed into street lamps and nursed the bruises that peppered my skin. I thought perhaps I was drinking too much, but actually the edges of the world were disappearing and I didn’t even know it.
Today, the signs are of things to come rather than pre-cursors to what has arrived. I wait for the markers of my deteriorating vision, notice how the glare of the sun gets meaner and how once effortless tasks are becoming more difficult. And some days I am moody. Some days I am careless. Some days I dream. And some days I drink too much.
