We Are Beautiful...November 12, 2021

You are beautiful. I am beautiful. Yes, we are beautiful today and always and forever.

This spring, I hardly looked at my body. Looking didn't interest me somehow, made irrelevant as the line between here and somewhere else blurred.

Days tumbled by as I fell from sofa to bed and back again. I guzzled water and forced myself to eat, knowing that my body needed my care but not my gaze.

Then nights would come.

Sometimes if woken, I would look in the mirror in that fuzzy, softened haze of light. Passing by my reflection, I might glance up to see myself pale, with no hair or eyebrows, brown spots on my face...like exotic tattoos.

Interesting, I would take note, perhaps stealing another glance. Very interesting, indeed, almost as a doctor would look at a clinical specimen. For I had separated from my body then, hovering above it, not quite sure where I belonged, here or there or anywhere or everywhere.

But then every single time...my eyes would happily widen, like a small child in front of a candy shop. Joy came, in the middle of those nights...as I saw an exotic Star Wars heroine rather than a sick patient. I was flying through the galaxy on a ship, not limping back to bed.

And now, my body is different, to be sure. It is grounded here again but it is very different than before. I miss my leg.

Living into this big change will be something for me. No way around it, must go through it. But I can choose what to see in this mirror. I can see myself as disfigured and too different to fit in somehow.

Or I can see myself as a heroine who survived a battle on the field or in the outer space.

My right leg swung a light saber and contained a tumor, and I will forever celebrate that leg's loyalty and courage for me. That it knew just what it had to do and bravely did it, sacrificing itself in my intergalactic adventure of the grandest sort.

All our bodies are this beautiful testament to our lives. Changing and slipping and softening as our years pass through that hourglass.

And we are superheroes every single day, not just when woken in the middle of the night during chemo. When we awake to an easy summer day of sun or when we fall out of bed to the dark of winter.

Every day. Each one of us, with all our gorgeous battle scars.

My wish is that we look beyond our reflection to see our hero within...and that that is what makes us smile more than any pleasing features. That we look in the mirror today and we smile and wink and say to ourselves and the whole wide world...

...thank you, thank you, thank you my sweet body.

You are beautiful. I am beautiful. Yes, we are beautiful today and always and forever.