Unmasked!

There was a time, I admit, when I was the girl who still cared what people thought or were saying about me. Whether it was in the school playground as a child, the teenager embarrassingly changing into gym clothes in the girl’s locker room or the young woman who suddenly found herself diagnosed with MS.

A scary sounding word, it’s wrath unpredictable.

“Oh I am so sorry to hear that”,was the initial response I would get along with the pitying looks. Behind closed doors or whispered over the phone lines was a whole new territory. A new playing field for everyone to talk about what a terrible disease I had been given and all the while thanking their lucky stars , God, or the universe, that it wasn’t them.

For years, my family and I, kept this deep dark secret that someone in our close knit family had just been delivered, what I then thought to be, a cell on death row. I would pretend for years that I could see things that I really could not for. MS had repeatedly played havoc on my optic nerves, leaving enough scars to prevent me from driving my car again or reading a paper back novel. One of life’s simplest joys which was now an impossible luxury.

Today, I can look back from a place of acceptance and I am left wondering why I had wasted so much energy on pretending to be what everyone expected, “ok”. It only took falling off a miniature golf putting hole and breaking my shoulder, to landing on a wintry airplane tarmac face first amidst snow and ice, to tripping over an unseen curb and landing nose first onto the concrete, causing a mini scene outside a local airport terminal.

Why did I care so much?

Who exactly was I trying to impress?

Obviously, not myself.

For if I had stopped living from a place of fear and shame years earlier, , I would have been in a much more peaceful and less fearful place. There is no shame to be felt. No need to stand in judgment of others. By accepting your life for “what is” opens the door wide open for you to take control and start living your own life again. I have now come to accept the use of a walking stick if I feel the need and don’t really care who I “think” might be staring.

After all, the only person you need to please is the face you see in your own mirror..

Cindy Lee Lothian

August 16, 2014

http://www.stillsexyafterms.com