Things to Confess

Okay, so I have some things to tell y'all that I haven't shared for various reasons.

Most of which entail large embarrassment on my part.

The first is that, well, my car inspection sticker has expired. It, um, expired in June. I know! I KNOW! But I just can't seem to remember about it until I'm in the car on my way to an appointment. (This is also why I still have a Texas Drivers License. Shhh.)

Now, let's talk about my hair. About six months ago or so, my hair began falling out at an alarming rate. Handfuls every time I showered. I had my thyroid checked and my medication levels were just fine so I assumed I was just...molting. So NOW, I have all this new growth on my head and on really humid days, like today, I look like this:


So, the last thing I have to confess today is something I just realized was embarrassing to me. I'd been wanting to write about it and I just couldn't bring myself to and suddenly it occurred to me that what I'm feeling is embarrassment. Which, GAH, is such a stupid response that I'm just going to tell y'all and be done with it. When we went to Disney, I needed one of those motorized scooter things to get around. Because of my foot. After the first half day at the Magic Kingdom, it was really clear that I couldn't keep up with my family and walk all over. (Plus, it was a reminder of how that kind of pain can erase all the good in your life with one step. I earned my new Grumpy jacket.)

Anyway, I have no idea why this is embarrassing to me. Clearly, I have issues that go far beyond my usual issues. Every time I've sat down to write about this, I've managed to find something that simply HAD to be done --like making my FaceBook language default English-PIRATE. (It's so amusing that I spent one whole day playing with it.) Or scrubbing my grout or something.

It was embarrassing to me at the moment, too. I found myself blinking back tears for the first hour or so. People kept giving me encouraging smiles --it was painful. (Well, except for the New Yorkers and they'd just walk right in front of me, mistakenly confident in my ability to handle the darn thing.) Babies would stare at me from their strollers as if to say, "Dude, what're YOU in for?" I was sort of deathly afraid that people would think I was using the scooter because I was so fat that my bones couldn't hold me.

I just... I just felt like everyone was staring at me.

(I'm, um, kind of crying a little as I write this.)

I think... I think maybe it's hitting me that the reality of living with a chronic mobility condition (no matter how much better it has gotten with these orthotics! Yea for orthotics! I heart you so!) is that I have to admit to not being able to do everything that normal (oh, just hush, you know what I mean) forty-four-year-old women can do. That's embarrassing to me.

And I'm embarrassed that I'm embarrassed because I worked for YEARS on behalf of people with disabilities. It turns out I'm just another unmarried marriage counselor, I guess. Or a racist civil rights worker. Or someone who works for an animal shelter whose dog is a pedigreed pure-bred. You get the picture: Hypocrisy R Us.

(Of course, after I'd been in the scooter for about a day, I really did start getting all, "Hello, where ARE my accommodations?" Disney World is amazingly accommodating to people with mobility issues but in, say, Norway (Epcot) there were some issues with the Maelstrom... just sayin'.)

At any rate, those are my confessions. I have one more about my NanoWriMo book but I'm going to wait until tomorrow to talk about that one. I can only bare my soul so much in one day.