Warily, I followed in my family’s footsteps onto the hard, wet concrete of the newly renovated neighborhood swimming pool. I was the only one in the group not wearing a swimsuit underneath my clothes, mostly because I knew I hadn’t yet garnered the courage to go swimming. Just being in the mere presence of chlorinated water made my palms clammy. I struggled to keep myself from breathing shallowly as the scent of pool water drifted into my nostrils. It had been five years since I last got that close to a swimming pool. Five. Long. Years.
My family, now all in the water, tried to coax me into going home to change into a swimsuit, then return to join them in a game of water football. After pausing to think for a moment, I declined, using the fact that I hadn’t shaved my legs since Florida as a weak excuse to not get back in the water. Then, I made a swift exit home to be alone with my thoughts, before anyone could tell me nobody gave a shit about my unshaven legs.
More honestly, I fled home out of fear, where I sat at the kitchen table sipping a cold glass of milk, silently beating myself up for giving into my fears yet again.
Damnit, said my inner monologue, You need to get over your phobia of water and just get the fuck in there. It can’t hurt you anymore. You’re a free woman. Get your swimsuit on, shave your legs, and go back to the pool to swim. C’mon, you live a block away from it. Go fuckin’ swimming!”
Despite what my mind was screaming, I could not get my body to move. I was just frozen at the table, staring blankly out the garden window into the backyard, feeling increasingly angry and defeated. Like I wasn’t taking advantage of the blessings I’d been given that so many others were denied. Like I was just being a coward.
Yet, no matter what, I couldn’t get myself to move. I couldn’t get myself to even go ankle-deep into that damn swimming pool with my family. Hell, I hadn’t even dipped a finger into the water to test it out. I simply spent five minutes stalking the perimeter of the main pool scowling, watching everyone else having a blast. Then I made a break for the exit, sprinting all the way home like I was being chased by a raging bull.
As much as I like to pretend that my past is behind me and does not influence me today, that can’t be farther from the truth. In most ways, I’m still the same sickly, scrawny, scared little girl I was a decade ago and beyond. I may be twenty years old, almost thrice the size of middle-school me, with coping mechanisms to keep my anxieties and fears from being too obvious (although, at some point those mechanisms fail when the fear becomes too strong), but I certainly don’t feel twenty, or healthy, or big, or brave.
Sure, to the outsider, I am probably one of the most badass people on the planet. But, I most certainly don’t think I am. I may let doctors and scientists run risky experiments on my body eagerly and without worry, but I’m still very fucking scared of thunderstorms and needles. I may be very physically active weigh close to 140 pounds, but I still see a limp, bony creature when I look in the mirror after showering, completely blind to what muscle-tone and strength I may actually have. I may have no problem cussing out God when I suffer intensely or a particularly angering memory bubbles to the surface, but I can’t even look at the cashier in the eyes at the grocery store. I may have friends that I’m comfortable being around, but it took years for me to get to this point with them, and I feel so inadequate and lonely when I see others making friends like that seemingly in just a few days.
Truthfully, I am not the confident badass people think I am. My spirit is still incredibly skittish, and my guard is never let down. I still think I’m far too stupid to go to college, especially after all of the abuse and bullying I endured for ten of the twelve years I was in school. I still have a lot of internalized ableism surrounding my ASD (Autism) diagnosis, and can’t seem to accept it. I am still deeply disturbed by the mental and physical scars my past has left behind; especially the scars left behind by medical procedures. I still can’t look at old photo albums of myself as a newborn without bursting into tears, and I absolutely refuse to watch the hours and hours of video tapes my family filmed of me while I was in the hospital twenty years ago.
I still can’t believe that little four-pound newborn on the ventilator, with a fresh open heart surgery scar running down almost the entire length of her torso, was me. I still can’t fathom how that little newborn managed to survive Pulmonary Atresia, Cystic Fibrosis, Sepsis, Pneumonia, and a handful of other health issues, all at once. I still don’t know why or how I lived to be twenty years old as healthy as I am. I just know that I did. Logically, at least. Mentally, I still can’t even begin to believe that one could survive all of that as a newborn, and that little newborn somehow grew up to be me.
Yet, I did. How I did, I don’t know. Why I did, I don’t know. I just know that I lived by the simple fact that I still exist above ground, even though logically and mathematically, I should’ve absolutely died when I was a newborn.
There’s a reason why the doctors offered to turn off the machines keeping me alive, after all.
With that in mind, is there any wonder why I’m still so scared of everything all the time? Why I’m basically the personification of anxiety? Why I can’t get myself to even dip a toe into the swimming pool? Why I feel wholly unprepared to live another fifty or sixty more years? After all, if the rules of the universe hadn’t been broken for me countless times, I wouldn’t be here. I would be a 20-year-old pile of dust in an infant-sized casket. A distant traumatic memory in the minds of my family members. A spirit roaming the pastures of heaven, waiting to reunite with my family.
Is there any question as to why I wrestle with God so much? Why I am basically pin-balling between atheism and theism every given day? Why I get so, so, so upset when someone offers to pray for me, or tells me my belief in God is just an illogical crutch because I’m otherwise too weak to carry the weight of everything I’ve been through thus far?
I still struggle to understand, let alone answer, why a good, loving, all-powerful God doesn’t prevent people from suffering from things like Cystic Fibrosis or Sickle Cell Anemia. Why children die from cancer. Why senior citizens are so often afflicted by dementia. Part of me thinks I have the answer, but a greater part of me knows I don’t and probably never will.
Hence is why I call myself a Christian, but still doubt and rage at God for allowing Pulmonary Atresia to exist.
This doesn’t mean I’m too chickenshit to accept the “truth” of atheism, or too egotistical to accept that there’s a reason, how ever unknown, why God allows genetic conditions and debilitating diseases to ravage every living thing in the universe. It just means that I’ve been through too much to simply ignore those problems, or just accept that “God works in mysterious ways.”, or I'm "asking the wrong questions" when I wonder why so much pain and death and suffering are allowed to exist in this ruthless universe.
After all, these tough questions have turned millions of religious people into agnostics and atheists, and continue to gnaw at the foundations of my own faith. It's not enough to beat around the bush or dismiss these questions and doubts with things like, "God works in mysterious ways", "Free will", or my favorite, "That's just the devil talking". We have to face these very real, very tough questions head-on, or else they will one day build up like gas fumes in an old tank and absolutely obliterate us.
Trust me, I know damn well what that's like from experience.
It still doesn't make sense to me how a toddler dying from cancer or someone suffering from end-stage dementia can be used for "greater good", as both people and Scripture say so. I can understand how a workout routine resulting in sore muscles and nausea builds up a person. I don't understand how Cystic Fibrosis killing a patient at the tender age of two (which is what happened to my great uncle in the 1950s) builds anyone up. If anything, it just sounds like needless suffering to me. Indeed, my great-grandparents weren't Christians, likely partly because of what happened to their son.
Yet, religious people of all kinds seem to believe that my great uncle and others somehow benefitted from his short, excruciating life on earth. After all, to be consistent, those of us who believe in an after-life must also believe that people who die due to being dealt a shitty hand in their earthly lives, can use their earthly experiences to help them along in the spiritual realm. This argument really pisses off my atheist side, but it simultaneously satisfies the Christian within me. And, honestly, I can't quite explain why.
