It’s not quite summer, but it’s the first time that it’s been hot enough to swim since last summer, so it feels like we finally made it full circle back to that lovely time full of fireworks, apple pie, hotdogs and all the other things I don’t like.
The summer has always come with too much pressure. The nice weather guilted me out when I was sick or tired. The sun loomed over my depression like an unwelcome light flipped on while I was trying to sleep. I tried to read through the beach volleyball and taco tuesdays, but a quiet sadness filled those hot nights.
My friend invited me to swim in the ocean recently. Even though I felt like absolute garbage mentally and physically, I decided to surprise myself, say yes, and put my strange alien body into a filthy body of water. After all, this was the first week of my exposure therapy for OCD. I might as well just go for it. Everything is dangerous and horrifying and amazing and it could make me sick all over again, or kill me, or it could flip my light on and wake me the fuck up.
And this glorious yes was followed by a slow sip of tea, the removal of my hand cast and a gentle application of some shimmering, coconut sun-screen that lifted my mood.
It was pretty boring.
Then I put on a swimsuit and stared all my scars down for too long. Way too long. I don’t know what the right move would have been, but this was the wrong one. I had been so sure of them. I had seen them every day for a year and yet, somehow, with the coconut in the air and the swimsuit framing them, they became menacing and out of place. I lingered on them, until I grew restless and changed into a different swimsuit. A different one. A sports bra and boxers. Then shorts.
I thought if I could just find the right one, I could win this chess game, but the scars were always one move ahead. I almost crawled back into bed, but I pulled on a dress, stuffed a swimsuit into my bag and forced myself out the door.
Until last year, I had no physical evidence of my pain or illness. In some ways, this was nice, because I was in control of what I wanted to share with people about my health, but it was also exhausting because it meant that no one could see my suffering, and they had to take me at my word.
When I got my first surgery last year, it was such a relief to finally have what I was feeling become visible. I saw physical scars appear on my body for the first time and I knew I would always have physical evidence marking me as different, so I could never blend in again.
It wasn’t until I was thrusting reject swimsuits at the floor that it really hit me. I didn’t realize how painful it would be to always be reminded of my pain and to never be able to get back to before. And to take this strange new body to the beach. This didn’t seem like a body that should have been going to that silky, clear-blue water, with the red sun falling slowly into it. It looked like it should have been going back to the hospital; like it belonged to that medical space now, in the hands of a doctor, running tests.
But I will be getting more surgeries soon and more scars, so this scarred body will be my only body. I will carry it with me to weddings, art exhibitions and the ocean to swim, not just the hospital and the doctor. So like death and taxes, this body and these scars will be the only truth I know. All I can do is love them all. The only alternative is living in a world without feeling that cool salt water press against my skin and I don’t want to know that world. Maybe next time I’ll skip the suit. I’m pretty sure that was the real problem.