For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it. Matthew 16:25
I am always losing things. Hell, I’ve even lost part of my mind. At any point in the last ten years, if you had asked me what was most important to me I would say my imagination. I’ve known since I was ten years old that there is nothing else I could do with full certainty in my mind and my imagination is a key part in that. Why then, at twenty would a person such as myself who had never had a major injury or illness up until that point in my life, suffer a blood clot and brain hemorrhage?
I lost and gained many things that day. I lost a significant part of my vision so that I am now unable to drive, but I am not considered legally blind. I am slower at working through problems. In my primary and secondary years, you could bank on me to be the first person to finish any test, regardless of how well I did on it. These days, I require time and a half for all of my tests and exams and a separate room to do so, otherwise I cannot focus. I have memory problems. I’ve left on stoves, missed appointments, and left birthday presents at the bar. That day I lost the idea that my body is invincible because not only does it constantly remind me how fallible it is, every time I walk into a tree, I have become injured in order to make up for my disability.
When I worked at Camp Arnes in the spring of 2012, not only did I have to battle my fears and demons to return to the place in which I almost died, I had to battle the kitchen staff in order to have enough nutrients to survive the day as a vegetarian outdoor education (a diet I picked up to prevent more blood clots, and you know NOT DIE), select oppressive bosses who believed that my beliefs in feminism, social justice and theatre opposed my position as a Christian camp worker, but I had to battle my blindness in teaching students archery. Every day before a class, I would set off five-ten practice shots in order to plan where I had to shoot my arrow to get it on the target at all during the demonstration. Over the two months I worked there, I developed some pain in my arm, enough that one night I cried instead of sleeping it was so bad. I left the next day to spend my day off in the hospital in Winnipeg to discover that I had developed carpal tunnel, a condition that affects me to this day. The time in Winnipeg gave me the space and the freedom for me to decide to leave Camp Arnes at that time, which was a difficult decision aided by the previously mentioned oppressive bosses.
However, though I lost some of my brain (including my temporal lobe) I also lost through my blood clot the depression I grappled with for many years. I’d worked, several months prior, in disentangling myself from my coping methods, including alcohol abuse, but I still suffered under the burden of my depression and my belief in the lie that no one loved me and that I wasn’t worth love. When I was rolled out of that hospital (in a wheelchair) to the airport, I felt this paradox of both carrying a new burden and being released of an old one.
I don’t like having a disability. I don’t think anyone could but for a long time having this disability forced me to rely on God for my needs because I knew I could not make it on my own. Surviving and yet having these issues, gives me this sense of gratitude and lightness for being alive and yet still having anger and frustration with the things that I have to deal with daily. I knew someone recently who didn’t seem to accept the idea that I had a disability because she grew up with ADHD. While I understood that some of my disability may seem like old news to her, for me, who has only been working through it for the past three years, it still makes me FUCKING ANGRY. I don’t look like I have a disability, so sometimes it is hard for people, even ones close to me to understand that I am not the same, especially as there are very few friends of mine in this city that new me previous to the brain surgery.
I am reminded of this, when, after I moved into a different house (I rent a room) I find myself missing my Bible and my Canon Rebel DSLR camera (an eight hundred dollar cost). I feel broken in that I can remember where it has been, but do not remember where it went after that. I have called myself stupid, an idiot and a fucking retard (a word I have never used to describe anyone else and actually find it pretty offensive). However, I am reminded, once again, that I need to rely on God for my needs because, just like everyone else, I am broken. No one’s brokenness is more or less special to God, but we are all broken in our own ways, whether we suffer physical brokenness, spiritual brokenness, broken hearts or just plain ignorance and pride. This past year I have been guilty of trying to survive without God. I filled up my time and became preoccupied with busyness. What I filled my time with wasn’t wrong, but cutting God out of it was. So when I read this verse, I am reminded that I cannot fix my life alone. There is no quick and easy fix for my brokenness. Doctors have specifically told me that whatever does not improve after the first year, will not improve. When I really rely on God for my needs, I can believe that I will be healed one day, but when I try to make do, on my own singular terms, there comes a day when I fuck things up and I fall to pieces. My inner peace shatters, I cry on a bed for an hour and I call myself a retard (again, an offensive word that I am ashamed of using, even in this circumstance).
What I need to remember is that my trial by fire was both curing and breaking in order to keep me from the lie that I can make it on my own. I need God and I need friends and I need family. As do we all.
For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it. Matthew 16:25
