Today I'm linking up to Lisa-Jo, aka gypsy mama, who chooses a topic every Friday and writes for five minutes.
Only five minutes.
And the rule is that whatever she writes about in that five minutes is what she posts. No editing her thoughts.
Today, her topic choice is "Beauty…"
So I'm going to set the timer, write some thoughts, and then I'm going to stop.
Ready? Set. Go.
:::
Beauty has always been a tough subject for me, mostly because for so many years I didn't see what others did when they looked at me.
It's taken me a lot of years to finally really believe that. That what I saw when I looked in the mirror was distorted. The girl who was once 83 pounds and saw fat and ugly in the mirror… that girl didn't see what was really there. But it took until now for me to really realize it.
It took Cushing's - ugly, mean and cruel Cushing's -for me to know that even when I do look in the mirror and see my worst nightmare that I won't break.
I had gained 70 pounds in a short four months. I stretched and pulled in deformed ways. I looked in the mirror every day and couldn't even see my own self in my eyes anymore and I realized that's what I had always done… looked in a mirror not recognizing who was there.
And just like I had no control over gaining it, I've had no control over losing it. I have spent the last year so sick that I lost all of that weight and then some. And now I look in the mirror and I see someone I recognize. But I see more than just me.
I see the real me.
Not the me I was afraid of at 15, and not the one I was searching for a year ago. I see the me with the off-color of illness in my skin and the sometimes red blotchiness of flash rashes and the Cushing's striations on my body that will never leave and still sometimes hurt to touch and I'm not afraid of any of it.
They are my marks of survival.
Friends come and I put on the foundation and I apply the mascara, but it's more so they aren't scared and they don't worry about how sick I am.
For me now, on normal days when I am bare faced and facing the day, I just look in the mirror and see someone who is still surviving and living through it. And there is beauty in that. In surviving.
I get that now.