Devastation and Reform

Tonsils

The summer after my freshman year of college, I got my tonsils out. It was the worst pain I’d ever known in my life thus far, and never again do I want to relive the two weeks it took to recover. If you got your tonsils out when you were five, you may think I’m over exaggerating the pain, but I want to punch you (lovingly) in the face and say, “Oh, naïve one, it is quite a lot different when you have adult tonsils and get them out at age nineteen.”

Also, the people that comment, “Oh, you are so lucky! You get to sit at home and eat ice cream every day!” are more annoying, because that is not at all something to be joyful about because it is all a lie. You are not even supposed to eat ice cream or any dairy because it does something to your throat where it makes it swell or something that makes it even harder for you to swallow.

So I ate nothing but popsicles for two weeks. Which turns out is a great way to lose twenty pounds, which would actually be exciting because I was able to fit into my favorite capris that I wore when I was a seventh grader, but it’s less exciting because you gain all the weight back and then some very quickly after you are able to eat solid food again.

And then there was the whole “sitting at home not being able to do anything” part. You see, when scheduling my surgery, I must have confused myself with Wonder Woman because I only asked four days off to allow for recovery. The fifth day came and I was feeling no improvement whatsoever. I tried to go back to work but then I almost passed out, so that stupid of me. So I spent two weeks not really showering much, not bringing home any bacon, wanting to cry at the thought of eating bacon, and eating popsicle after popsicle until I never wanted to look at popsicles again.

I tried eating a slushie, which sounded refreshing because it was also July at the time. My best guy friend brought it to me. And I projectile vomited the entire red slushie everywhere. That’s generally not the most appealing time in your life and you definitely don’t want to have people see you like that, but when you have great friends, they will sit in your room with you and talk to you even though you are only able to respond by writing in down or texting it to them. That’s what friendship looks like.

That friendship was built over spending weekends together at the bowling alley. Buying ranch fries after a breakup and sitting at a baseball game. Making fun of his yellow shirt that he found randomly; he says he found it in his house, but secretly you know he found it in some trash heap. That friendship would be something you would depend on, and so when you find yourself not only not friends anymore, but actually more like complete strangers, it is a little hard to take in.

Unlike the other times when you’d drifted apart but somehow always found your way back to each other again, you know this time is different. You know this time he is choosing to have nothing to do with you. So if you run into each other, you make awkward conversation about Chinese food, but it’s nothing more than mere small talk about the weather, similar to conversations you have with complete strangers while in the Post Office or waiting in the checkout lane in Target.

So maybe life takes turns you don’t expect, but it doesn’t have to make you cry every time you think about the changes. Maybe you can hold your memories like mental photographs. They become a part of you. It’s not that when the moment has passed, there is a part of you missing. It’s all the little parts that become who you are. So that even when you look down at your feet and find yourself standing somewhere different than you thought you’d be, you know that everything has shaped you. It’s become so engraved into who you are, you don’t shed it off like dead skin. You wear it underneath the protection of your ribs, and it beats in your head like your heart.

Here’s my thank you and goodbye, because you in life, you’ll find yourself needing to say both.

Growing

I was once told that you grow the most as a person the summer after your first year of college. I am now finished with my third year of college, and each summer I think I grow more than the last. But I remember my first summer after college. If I weren’t leaving in two weeks for London, this summer would look very much like that summer.

I spent my summer working in the kitchen at the nursing home. I would cook meals and wash dishes. I would ask old ladies if they wanted coffee and try to remember not to accidentally give any Seventh Day Adventists scalloped potatoes and ham. Sometimes we would not have the right ingredients and I’d have to make it work—sometimes it was as easy as using cream of celery soup when the recipe called for cream of mushroom other times, I’d have to make something completely different, but either way, I’d make it work. Because, like Tim Gunn tells us, you have to make it work.

I would run into former high school classmates, some I’d smile and hug. Others have since unfriended me on Facebook. But I threw up my grudges when I threw up my graduation cap. I let go of the times that people hurt me. As we all continue to scatter into different places in the world, though most are still in the tri-state area, we all make choices that lead us to different places.

That was the summer I was dating a guy who lived in Colorado. The relationship suffocated not because of the summer heat, but because of the miles. The miles held us apart like positive and negative ends of a magnet. Always trying to connect them, but they were pushed apart. My birthday is during the summer, but that day he never said happy birthday. He never even talked to me. We grew as separate people; probably both always knowing it would never work out with neither of us making it a priority. In a relationship, I’d always just wanted someone who would fight for me, and he wasn’t the one who would. So it ended before I would head back to college in the fall.

I am back at the nursing home this summer, working shifts before I leave. I put on my hairnet and wash the same dishes, asking old ladies if they want tea or coffee, running back to the kitchen to grab a glass of milk or sour cream. I am wearing the same scrubs and tennis shoes, but I’ve come a long way since my first summer after college.

Maybe it was not the summer I grew the most, but I grew enough to help me stand on my feet the summer after—also known as the first summer I spent away from home. Now here I am, about to embark on my first summer spent in a foreign country. The air conditioner in my home turns on, the piles of clothes rise in my bedroom, and I take a deep breath. Sometimes growth hurts, but I cannot go back to yesterday. Like Lewis Carroll says, I was a different person then.

And I’m so glad I’m continuing to grow.

The Point

I have always lived by the never-use-more-than-three exclamation point rule, except that the rule is actually more complicated. Because simply calling it the never-use-more-than-three exclamation point rule would imply that it would be okay to just use two exclamation points, but that’s also not okay. You can use one or three. Never any other numerical amount.

But today I broke that rule. I’m not even entirely sure why. I think subconsciously I feel like you are more socially acceptable if you use an insane amount of exclamation points after you send someone a “Happy Birthday” text. Of course if you were actually just telling them happy birthday, you would probably not yell it in their face. (Of course maybe you would, in which case, I’m not really here to judge.) My English professor illustrated this point by bringing in some sort of terribly punctuated email and after he read a sentence that ended in an exclamation point, he would violently pound the table. This made me afraid and also regret sitting in the front row.

I actually love exclamation points. But all of that is beside the point, because I didn’t set out to write this post about exclamation points.

Sometimes I look at myself and wish I had a six-pack. I don’t, of course, but I do have a two-pack. I mentally call it my “two-pack of possibilities” because I know it would be possible for me to have a six-pack if I put forth the effort. This may surprise you if you think I look like an athletic person, which I have been told that before. Someone told me I look very athletic when my hair is in a pony tail, which rarely happens because I feel like my forehead is large and pony tails make it look larger.* A guy at The Buckle also told me that I look like someone who could run fast.** Anyway, there are possibilities sometimes we don’t let ourselves believe.

I was looking through all the different graduating classes from the area and their class mottos. They were all corny and incredibly cliché, but when I remember how I felt when I was graduating, I believed I had a lot of possibilities in my future. And I still do. I am currently one year away from graduating college with my undergraduate degree. And I’m going to London for the summer. It’s weird because I’ve done many things I would never have imagined.

So as corny and cliché as it may be, you can do far more than you can imagine right now. Yes. I know, you are rolling your eyes, but it’s true.

You see, what has happened to you shapes you and has made you who you are today, but it does not define you. It does not pigeonhole you into a spot you cannot escape. It does not define you.

So get off the couch! Life is waiting!

*I will, however, be wearing my hair in a pony tail more often now, though, because I am going back to working at the nursing home for the next three weeks. I work in the kitchen, so not only do I have to wear my hair up, but I have to wear a hairnet. I’d be embarrassed if not for the fact that I can rock a hairnet like you wouldn’t believe.

**Of course now that I think about it, maybe he was not complimenting my possible athleticism, and is instead concerned because maybe I look like a prime candidate for someone who would shoplift.

***Also, I am not sure if that exclamation point rule is real or not. But I say it is, and it is my blog, so I do what I want.