Self-portrait Tuesday

This month's Self-Portrait Tuesday challenge is "all of me."

February Challenge "all of me" - embrace your mistakes, love the ugly bits.

These are my feet.


It’s hard to walk barefoot.


This is the ugly part.



Chances are you already know about my toelessness. If not, you can read the long version (and by long, I mean really long). Here’s the short version: Freshman year of college (in 1999), I got bacterial meningitis. Lost my toes. Got lots of scars. Stayed in hospital for three months.

Chances are you know my meningitis story because I talk about it too much. At least I used to. After I recovered and came back to school, I talked about my experience ad nauseam. I couldn’t help it. I was dealing with normal people, normal girls that would be able to wear skirts and sandals and high heels for the rest of their lives, and I wanted to scream in their faces when they looked at me funny for wearing long pants and sneakers in July. I felt like I had to tell everyone my story. “Don’t you know what I’ve been through?” “Aren’t you proud of me for having the courage to move on?”

I could tell when my friends were getting sick of me, but I couldn’t drop it. I hated myself for rehashing it, but something compelled me to continue talking about it. I fed off people’s sympathy and admiration.

Two years after I got sick, I was in a magazine writing class, and I finally kicked my habit. I finally learned that everyone has a story. Everyone has been through something difficult. Some students had attempted suicide. Some had parents going through a divorce. Some developed lumps in their breasts at age 20. Some were single parents. Everyone had a story, and no one was all that special. It was in this class I finally wrote about my story. I was supposed to write about another topic, but one night while suffering from writer’s block, I let all the events of my freshman year fall on the page. I jotted down all the things I wanted to scream to people, all the stuff my friends and roommates had to listen to for the past two years. And then I was done. Writing was my therapy.

After that, I rarely spoke of my incident. I lived in London for four months, and my two flat mates never knew about my story. I would sneak past them when I was barefoot so they wouldn’t see my feet. I never showed my scars. It wasn’t until two years later when I was at one flat mate’s wedding that the other realized I had scars on my legs.

I had finally realized that the most significant event in my life didn’t need to be shoved in people’s faces. But here I am, writing about it in my blog, shoving it in everyone’s face again. That’s the ugly bit, not my disfigured feet or my scarred legs. The ugly bit is my constantly yapping mouth.