New Year, New Me?

I've always been someone pretty comfortable in my skin.  I've never cared about my thick thighs or double chins.  I've never been skinny, but I never felt ashamed in a bathing suit.

However, chronic illness often makes you feel like you don't know your own body.

I haven't been able to ride my bike in fourteen months.  482 days.  I can't even explain how trapped I feel without my bicycle.  I can't explain the sense of feeling trapped by bus schedules and the limits of my body's ability to walk more than a mile.  I haven't been able to work out in more than a year.  I can't explain how out of shape, flabby and gross I feel.  Part of it is just feeling ill.  But my strong muscular body is turning to fat and I hate it.

I can't see properly anymore.  Sure, I can read, and I have vision well enough to get my license back.  But my vision is forever permanently altered in a way that I hate.  I need glasses for both up close and for far away now.  I feel trapped in my eyeballs.  It's sometimes reported that Monet put off his cataract surgery and he hated his vision after he finally had it.  I understand completely, Monet.  The water lilies look like shit now and I hate it.

My hair is curly now.  I had the straightest finest hair, the kind of hair you could leave the house without brushing.  It airdried quickly, usually before I even finished getting ready.  But like everyone, I wanted the type of hair I didn't have.  I spent my childhood longing to have curly hair like my mom and sister.  I'd spend hours in the bathroom with a curling iron, desperate to get my hair to have a little volume.  It never did anything.  Stylists would curl my hair only for the curls to fall usually as I was leaving the salon.  Over the last few years it has started to change  Losing my hair due to the shock of illness and surgery and low-dose chemotherapy and other medicines has completely changed the texture of my hair.  I chopped off six inches recently....got rid of the thin, scraggly dead bleached ends and suddenly my hair is bouncy and super wavy.  It's weird.  Having straight hair for the crucial awkward learning how to style days has left me completely unaware of how to deal with wavy hair.  When I try to style my hair for work, I feel like a teen trying to style her hair for the first day of 8th grade.

I've always known who I am.  But what do you do when you don't recognize yourself in the mirror?

So New Year, New Me seems better than ever this year.  I'd love to be someone else when I wake up tomorrow.  Truthfully, I love New Years.  A chance to reflect and move forward.  I've always a fan of taking stock and growing and moving forward. I have had a really bad couple of years.  I've had some people I loved pass away.  I thought I found love after so long thinking it would never come....I was wrong.  Every time I turn around my health is a new challenge.  I won't go into all of the hell my life has been.  It's a lonely world to be sick all the time.  The struggle has been real.  Sometimes, I wish I could wake up tomorrow and it could all be different.

Don't get me wrong, I love my life.  I've got a lot going for me.  But it's easy to wish for a cop out.  To wake up and make a resolution to be different, and for it to come true.  Wishes and hopes and dreams are important.  That's why I love New Years.  A new slate, a new chance.  There's something great about it.

So right now, I'm going to go to the balldrop and cry myself into the New Year.  "If nobody sees you cry, you can say it was raining outside"...and it is raining, so I'm all good there.  Because tonight, I'm going to be sad about how bad the end of 2018 has been.  And tomorrow?  Tomorrow I'm not sure...maybe next year will be better than the last.