Blood & A Canvas Sack Full of Tiles
Exhilarating change. Plus an overworked metaphor, as is my custom. Xx
Historically, I have hated getting my blood drawn. I remember the first time quite distinctly. My pediatrician’s office was in the building next door to my grandparents’ apartment, so I was with my grandmother—there for the usual annual physical. But contrary to usual programming, I was suddenly being ushered into a different room and told that they were going to take my blood.
No one talks about this moment, maybe because it’s not such a crisis for most children, but I was horrified. All these years of agreeing to go to the doctor and being a good girl and not being difficult about shots or finger pricks and not gagging like my sister did when they stuck swabs down my throat. And, now! Now, they announce without any warning that they’re about to set up a full blown siphon at the crook of my arm?
It completely set me off. No one told me I would ever have to do this! On top of that, they kept saying I would now have to do this every year for the rest of my life. I tried to fight them to no avail, which upon reflection, probably made me feel like I wasn’t in control of what was happening to my body. Philosophically speaking, something unsettled me about the whole premise. It was my blood!
I simply had to make a scene. I worked myself up to such an extent, that I basically had to be restrained and handed a brown paper bag. I screamed the entire time, and it was a harrowing ordeal for all involved. They told me I was scaring the other children in the waiting room. I felt so ill afterwards that I had to go upstairs and take a nap in my grandmother’s bed.
It was then and there that I decided, under the mysterious alchemy of genuine fear mixed with something else more conscious, that this was going to become a part of me. I was the type of person who couldn’t handle getting her blood drawn.
The next time I had to get my blood drawn was in high school when I had mono. I made my sister come to the health center with me, and in short order I had hyperventilated myself into actually passing out, albeit briefly. I was happy to take the opportunity to miss afternoon sports—indoor track at the time, which I had already been faking a back injury to get out of—so I spent the rest of the afternoon in a bed upstairs eating cookies and drinking ice cold water straight out of the plastic pitchers they brought up to me. My throat was terribly sore on top of the blood-draw trauma since I did indeed have mono.
My determination that I was the type of person who couldn’t handle getting her blood drawn persisted. Every year, I would tell the nurse that I hated getting my blood drawn, that I had been known to pass out, that I needed them to talk to me, and that if I saw any blood, even out of the corner of my eye, we’d have a serious problem on our hands. I like to think I grew up a little because the screaming stopped, though I wasn’t above a moan or a whimper. In retrospect, I have to admit, that over time, my aversion to the whole thing had been waning.
Then, yesterday, I had my annual physical, and when they came in to draw my blood, I thought to myself, what would happen if I didn’t say anything to this friendly nurse whose brother is also a Capricorn? What if I just acted like I was normal and didn’t mind getting my blood drawn? I even thought about looking at my left arm where the blood was flowing out painlessly, just to see it. I decided baby steps would be more appropriate. But aside from not looking directly at my…leakage (sorry), I just sat there, felt my fingers get cold and was fine.
Without warning, on an unassuming Wednesday, something disturbing and exhilarating happened: something that had been true about me was no longer true about me. One little mosaic tile of this outward facing personality that I have constructed over my twenty some years of life slipped the grout, fell to the floor, shattered. I am no longer a person who can’t handle getting her blood drawn.
It got me thinking about the process by which these little tiles accumulate and stick and the process by which they fall away. Of course, the hating-getting-blood-drawn thing was not really a central part of my personality. It rarely came up. But I’m made up of thousands of these things, some bigger some smaller. Proclamations I have made—like blue is my favorite color or I don’t wear sneakers because they make my feet look weird or I think moths are Satan’s insect or I’m going to be a vet. If there’s one thing I do tend to do, it’s make a proclamation. Oop—there’s another one!
As children, these things change, daily, weekly, monthly. Not a vet anymore, a ballerina. Now President of the United States. It’s cute. But something happens in later adolescence. I’m obviously not a developmental psychologist, and one of my metaphorical tiles for a semester in college was that I never actually attended my Abnormal Psychology lecture, so I don’t know the official terminology for these phases or anything about what actually takes place in them. My suspicion, however, is that in later adolescence, these preferences and proclamations and their resultant “traits” begin to feel more immovable.
Part of it is probably preservation. To feel grounded on this planet, particularly in youth when everything feels like a hurricane inside (though my personal brand of internal natural disaster in high school was probably more of a mudslide), we must tie ourselves to goalposts. We must grab onto as many disparate whirling pieces as we can and glue them to ourselves. Sorry, grout them to ourselves: I don’t play sports, I can never drink gin again because of that one horrible night, I like blue nail polish on my toes.
It’s not that these things are entirely engineered, they’re of course crafted out of the genuine feelings and preferences of the moment. But I do think another element of this cementing process is captured by the alchemy mentioned above. It’s genuine feeling and preference mixed with something more conscious. And this conscious element—I believe—is driven by our need to exist concretely in other people’s eyes.
We want people to be able to say, that’s Eve, she sprained her own ankle in the hallway to get out of JV Soccer practice and her favorite color is blue and she hates moths and she doesn’t eat vegetables, can you believe that?! No, like none of them. And oh, by the way, she hates getting her blood drawn.
Recently, it feels like more of my tiles are falling away. The rate has probably remained pretty constant, but I guess I’m noticing it happening. And it feels so good. It feels like a miracle, to change. Sometimes it feels embarrassing, momentarily. Like oh my gosh, I’ve been running around for years telling people that all vegetables taste like dirt, but they really don’t. WHY would I make that a part of my personality??? But then you remember that no one is thinking or talking about you as much as you think anyway. And you realize that you were wrong! And that the truth is better than you ever thought, and the exhilaration takes over.
It occurs that these fairly arbitrary external markers are not so relevant. Maybe that’s what growing up is. Whatever stage of developmental psychology this is (brain-fully-form-ed-ness-apparently??), it’s really very delightful. One begins to realize that all is constantly in flux. One is me. I begin to realize. I won’t give up my tiles of course and I probably won’t stop making proclamations anytime soon if ever, even as I know more and more how little I know.
We must have the tiles. They make life fun and are helpful for when someone needs to give you a birthday present. I love swans and clams and clouds and good books (that’s a big one obviously). I’m addicted to sitting on my roof. And my favorite color is green not blue! BUT, now I think I’d like to hold my tiles in a little canvas sack—like scrabble letters or assorted marbles—instead of pasting them to myself with an adhesive made of sand.
And the ones that will delight me most, when I pull them out of my little canvas sack to show them off are the one’s that say something more:
That’s Eve, she carries stamps in her wallet so that she can send letters and postcards to her friends & lover no matter where she is. She goes for long runs on the weekends because she cares about her body. (Don’t you dare mention the knee destruction that is underway as a result of the running behavior. This is obviously a fantasy, per the above, I know no one’s actually talking about me!!!!) That’s Eve, she donates blood every few months because she wants to help people, and she doesn’t mind getting her blood drawn anyway.
Love you, bye!