by Jennifer Crystal
I never liked playing dress-up as a kid. I didn’t like pretending to be someone I wasn’t.
Sure, I could get into the spirit for Halloween. There are photos of me dressed as a blue crayon, a bag of M+Ms, as a pair of lips blowing a big pink bubble, next to my best friend who was a pack of gum. But for the rest of the year, the makeup was off and the costumes remained in a trunk. I didn’t want to be a princess, a fairy, or as was fashionable in my youth, a punk rocker. I just wanted to be me.
Then I got Lyme.
The disease that had masked itself for years in my body came raging forth with such virulence that it turned me into a bedridden shell of my former self. That former self knew resolutely who she was. She was a teacher, a skier, a runner, a traveler, a social butterfly. She had driven cross-country five times (joking that was four too many); she had backpacked across Europe and battled deep powder in the Back Bowls of the Rocky Mountains. She was fun, ambitious and full of life.
Then, suddenly, she was none of those things.
My youthful aversion to dressing up seemed to return to haunt me. Lyme forced me to be someone I didn’t want to be. I didn’t want to be sick. I didn’t want to spend my days in bed. I didn’t want to be in pain. I didn’t want to be sad and angry, frustrated and scared.
Who does? No one likes to be sick. Everyone feels out of sorts when they have a cold or the flu. Unfortunately, Lyme is like an endless flu. For months and sometimes years patients wake each day with the same aches, the same migraine, the same fever, the same exhaustion. Lyme sucks the life out of us, and after awhile, we start to lose sight of who we are. We feel shoved into a costume of illness—one we certainly didn’t pick—and we want nothing more than to tear it off.
That costume is snug. It wraps patients like mummies. There are no zippers or buttons to break free. In reality, Halloween lasts one day—maybe two or even a week if you can find enough parties. But then you take your costume off. You can choose to put on another costume at another time, just for fun. Lymies don’t have that option.
If the outside world could see how ugly the costume of illness is—how little it resembles who we really are—they might not say, “Maybe you just need to exercise more” or “You just need to get out and do something” or “You’d feel better if you were working” or “It’s all in your head.” That fun-loving, high-achieving, mountain-conquering person I once was—the one who was hidden under illness—wanted nothing more than to go for a run, get a job, or get on a plane and leave the world of convalescence behind—but I couldn’t.
After years of treatment, I’m much freer now. The illness has not completely discarded like a costume in a trunk, but it’s still loosely hanging around my ankles. Parts of myself that were completely stifled by Lyme and its co-infections are finally liberated. I’m not gallivanting around Europe, but I can take short trips. I’m not conquering the Alps, but I can spend a morning on a local ski hill. I can’t work a traditional 9-5 job, but I can write. So while I could dress up for Halloween, I’m not going to do so. Because the only person I’ve ever wanted to be is myself. And now that she is back, I’m not going to do anything to cover her up. Been there, done that!
Opinions expressed by contributors are their own.
Jennifer Crystal is a writer and educator in Boston. She is working on a memoir about her journey with chronic tick borne illness. Contact her at jennifercrystalwriter@gmail.com.
