The Evolution of a {Wo}man

On the promise that I would love this class from one of my oldest friends, I happily signed up for an anthropology class. Now, with the midterm only one day away, I'm beginning to wonder how my friend could've been so wrong.

It's evolution. It's all about evolution.

I can have spoken by mind, stated my peace to my class and teacher, but I get ridiculed for my beliefs, and points taken off on exams. I hate this class.

You can only hear the words "65 million years ago" so many times in your lifetime.

I'm about to calm all your fears, I do NOT beleive in evoluion (nor will I ever!), but I'm running out of ways to convince everyone else. They have really good reasons for believing in what they do, and only the small, but ever present warm glow in my heart telling me that God invented the world about 6,000 years ago keeps me from beleiving it too.

Currently, I'm sitting in Panera Bread in the same booth I've been at for the past two hours trying to cram all this nonsense into my head for the midtem tomorrow. It's been an internal struggle with myself, because 1/2 of me wants to get a good grade but the other 1/2 doesn't want to remember all this garbage. This has been one of the hardest semesters of my life, and I'm not only talking about classes and homework.

There's this Mamma Mia song called "Our Last Summer", and a line in the song says, "I can still recall our last summer". Well, if we're recalling summer, I had an extra twin hanging around the house, backing me up with Mom and Dad and reinforcing my beliefs about evolution and Obama and that kind of crap. I had a best friend at my beck and call, and was in almost constant contact with three other friends.

Fast forward 213 days (how long my twin has been out of the house), I'm currently friendless. I sit at home alone most nights, with only myself and Wilbur (my stuffed pig) to keep me company. My "Best" friend is a three year old drool monster, who calls me his sweetheart and sings Michael Frante's "(Say Hey) I Love You" to me. :) I'm his babysitter. There is a good side to all this, his parents are basically putting me through college with extra to go around. But I wouldn't call it a fair trade for my friends being gone. I still don't understand what happened there, all of a sudden it seemed I didn't deserve decent, "Hi, I miss you" text message.

But these past few months I've done more things than I knew I was capable of. I wrote paper in an hour and a half at midnight, I racked up my bank account to a respectable number, smiled more than I ever thought possible when my nieces and nephews come over, basically learned how to keep a house running in absence of my mom's walking ability, and heard the phrase "You're going to be a great wife and mother" over and over agian. But most of all I've learned I can depend on myself for most stuff. I learned to grow up (OK, maybe not all the way. I still have a Disney Princess room...), and now I'm learning that the things I can not do, I have to have to have to give that to Jesus. It's a long, tiresome, lonely process, but hopefully in the long run I'll be proud of myself and better off for it.

*If my professor read this, he would probably say that I have evolved into higher evolutionary thinking, then I would probably look at him and laugh. But truth be told, I have evolved. I have "developed or achieved" a new sense of looking at the world, and the lonesome circumstances around me. I have evolved a new woman {for myself}.

"If so many are lonely that seem to be lonely, it would be inexcusably selfish to be lonely alone". -- Tennessee Williams.

Shadows

February 2, Groundhog Day: anyone within the borders of the United States should be able to tell you that. But within my family, it means something else. You see today marks the day that I am cancer free.

My type of cancer hits kids young, a sick joke played on the littlest victims. They call it retinoblastoma, cancer of the retina. I was "fortunate" to get the kind that isn't genetic, and they caught it in time so that it only injured one eye, and I'm alive. I could have ended my life before my 2nd birthday, but I'm here now. This is the day I'm cancer free: then why am I crying?

I know. I know I should be happy, I know I should've spent the whole day smiling and telling everyone I come across that I'm the luckiest girl in the whole wide world. But I don't feel lucky-- pretty much the exact opposite.

I was little. I was just a baby, but somehow I remember it. Not all of it, of course, but I remember my hospital room. I remember crying in the exam rooms for my mom, and trying to lie still in a MRI machine clutching my stuffed bunny in my small hands. I remember the Beauty and the Beast wall decoration in the waiting room, and the calming presence of my mom and my Aunt Julie in the hospital. I remember all those things. I can think about them whenever I want to, or even when I do not want to. So why should it be any different that everyday I remember that I lost my eye to this terrible disease? Why do people find it so hard to believe that everyday I think about how different I am from the people I know, and why it's so hard for me to let it go?

I like February 2nd because I know for sure it's the only other day when other people are thinking about my cancer, and not just me. That may sound bad, but it's such a huge burden in my life, and I've had to carry it alone for 364 days out of every year for 17 years. How does the grudge and memory even last that long?

As if the memories of my treatments aren't hard enough, my battle scar is bold and visible to the whole world. It comes in the form of a glass eye; painted closely enough to resemble my regular eye, but glossy and painful enough that people notice that something is different about me. Everyone knows the feeling that someone is staring at you, maybe in a restaurant, or riding the bus, but most times you can feel someone else's eyes on you. Try multiplying that by ten, and having it happen to you every time you go out. Then see if you feel lucky or not.

I hate being different. I hate it almost as much as I hate the fact that I had cancer. I don't want to play the martyr, or the victim, but I can't see any good in this, I only see that I got screwed. This eye has brought me nothing but pain over these past 17 years now that I've had to deal with it, and I'm sick of it.

I'm tired of not feeling pretty. I'm tired of being different. I'm tired of going to doctors appointments to hear terms like "your deformity" or "more surgery can maybe fix your face, Little Miss". Those words cut me deeper than any surgeon's blade ever could.

But I'm also tired of living behind my glass eye. I'm tired of being defined by it. I'm tired of using it as an excuse. I'm tired of be threatened by it. I'm just over all tired of having it. I live only a fraction of what I could actually live, because I don't want the world to see how different my disease has made me.

Being cancer free today is bittersweet. Thank you Jesus I have this day to celebrate, and the wonderful day I do have. But I need to know why. I need to know why I'm so, incredibly, different, if I'm ever going to come out of my shadow.