In a guestroom, I placed a small wooden plaque instructing, “Just live your little life.” I like the admonition. And I need it.
Most of us have little lives. Not unimportant or trivial lives, but lives that don’t rock the world. There are the powerful, influential people who usher in movements or manage large organizations or invent cures or other inventions. There are even the select few who are successful and well-known as creatives or politicians or businesspersons. Then there are the rest of us. Yet with the clamor of social media constantly filling feeds with the famous, glamorous, powerful, and generally successful, one might think it normal to stand out. When in fact, the stand outs require a whole field of wallflowers. Most of us will always be wallflowers. Wallflowers are “normal.”
I recently read three autobiographies of creators I admired. I enjoyed the books or I wouldn’t have read them; but in each case, the stories seemed at times a litany of important people. Like the storytellers were compelled to mention every influential person who paraded through their lives and living rooms over the course of years. And indeed, I expect they were compelled, by publishers who know our scroll-hungry world rates people as worthy of listening to or reading based on the important people who feature among their set. But to my ears, these litanies grew wearisome. I preferred the quiet stories, the quiet encounters that marked these very human lives.
Closed doors and other openings
Through the course of my life, chronic illness has walled off many aspirations and lives. I say, “just live your little life,” and I’m often talking to myself. Jobs I thought I would have that I was not—alas—healthy enough for: college professor, activist/human rights worker, chaplain…. The opportunities that came in their stead have been my real life’s work. Just live your little life, little one.You are a beautiful dandelion.
{Photo by Elena Pasenko for Scopio}
This isn’t to say grief has not visited with every closed door. The disappointments started young. I was ten or eleven and tear-struck on Easter morning, having to miss Easter brunch and the chance to wear my Easter dress because a migraine wouldn’t let up. Wearing Easter dresses was a stand-out occasion in my childhood—the dresses often made by my mother to my specifications (favorite fabric, favorite colors), with matching hat and shiny new shoes. I would have gone to church in terrible pain, so long as I could wear my dress. But recognizing I was not well enough, my parents insisted I stay home.
A few years prior to that Easter, I had an experience that shaped the rest of my life—a serious traumatic brain injury (TBI), though the impact—pardon the pun—was not recognized for decades. I was six years old and riding on a friend’s handlebars when, in the course of a crash, I was thrown; I struck my head hard on the pavement. Contusion (bleeding), concussion, unconsciousness, hospitalization, a wound on my temple. And then it was over. Or so everyone thought. I’m not sure a connection was made in my youth between that accident and my migraines, my childhood sadness (and in adolescence, depression and suicidal ideation), or my other health problems. It was the 1970s and TBIs weren’t understood as they are now. What’s more: I was a pleaser—and an expert at faking it. Often because of shame, I kept unwellness, as I kept reading problems, to myself. It wasn’t until I was 39, and years of poor health led to a discovery of hypopituitarism and perilously low cortisol, that the impact of that early TBI saw the light of diagnosis: adrenal insufficiency.
Maybe I intuitively knew at a young age that my powers were limited, and I would “live a little life” against my often wishes. I seemed propelled from youth to hurry up and live. Finished high school early, married/divorced early, had a child early, got a PhD by 30, in my early 30s wrote my first books, in my late 30s, a memoir and a play to be performed by two theaters. By then, I had married/divorced again. I tried to beat odds, to open closed doors. But as in that bike accident in 1976, I was thrown down, often by my own body. Then I picked myself up and continued on with my little life. My beautiful little life.
{Roughly 52% of Americans live with chronic illness. If you know someone who might benefit from this series, please share.}
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In