Content warning: mention of suicide, discussion of anxiety and illness.
Even since I was 12 years old, I’ve had stretchmarks all over my body. I’m talking the entire length of my legs from ankle to thigh, as well as my upper arms, stomach, and back. I’ve never been bullied or picked on for it. If anything, people are usually concerned. I remember one of closest friends at university cautiously asking me about them after we’d been friends for a year. I can picture what she might have imagined: a dramatic scene of suicidal anguish, or some random attack where I had been slashed all over.
The reality is quite clinical. My stretch marks are side effects—remnants of a childhood illness that still afflicts me. It’s scarred my perspective as well as my body.
There’s this saying that sick children inevitably experience arrested development: You are forced to live out your days as the child you were when diagnosed.
I’m reminded of this every time I go home or see someone who knew me as a kid. Instead of “How are you?” or “What are your plans?”, the first question I get asked is “How’s your health?”. I’m not bitter about it. I consider myself lucky that my friends and family genuinely care about me. The nature of my illness was also not very traumatic or terrible.
This is how it happened: My body would painfully swell up to twice its normal size. A week or two in hospital would follow, and then I would be allowed to come home under bed rest for another few weeks.
For a nerd who loved falling into a good book, those drugged-up pain-free days reading in bed weren’t half bad.
However, as I grew older, my feelings about being ill started to change. See, when you’re a 12-year-old kid, you don’t really realise your parents’ sacrifices. Every time I relapsed, my mum would take time off to look after me. She worked with my dad at the small cafe he owned. As low-income immigrants with kids and a mortgage, they couldn’t afford to hire anyone else. My illness meant that my dad would have to run the cafe by himself all day. Yet, like most immigrant fathers, he never complained and just got the job done.
A few years later, my hajurba (grandad) got sick at the same time I had my fourth relapse. Mum had to decide whether to fly to the other side of the world to be with him, or to stay with her sick daughter. I remember telling her she would regret it if she didn’t go. Looking back, this was when my anxiety started. I remember thinking “How dare I get sick and force my mum to have to make this choice?”
On the outside, I seemed resilient and strong as I told her I’d be fine without her; on the inside, I had started dipping my feet into a deep pool of guilt.
Soon, we got into a routine that was almost instinctual each time I was taken to hospital. Like clockwork, my parents would get up at 5:00am to visit me. My mum would feed me breakfast and stay with me all day, while my dad went to open the cafe at 7:00am. My brother would walk to the hospital after school every day till my dad closed up and came to pick him and my mum up, and then they would all stay with me till after dinner. At the time, this was the norm and I was too sick to think about it too much. Afterwards, I would realise how much their lives revolved around my illness, and guilt would drown all my thoughts.
The time between relapses—usually a few months, a year if I were lucky—was filled with arguments. Like all brown parents, mine were strict about me going out, and my added vulnerability seemed to legitimise their concerns. I’d want to go swimming, or go on camp. My parents would fret “Do you want to get sick again?”, “You’ll get too tired”, “You’re not ready yet”.
I wanted to live a normal life, but I didn’t want to risk getting sick and being a burden on everyone.
By then, I was well into high school. The pressure of grades and maintaining friendships and pleasing my parents was getting to me. I’d find myself actually wanting to get sick when I needed a break from life and then immediately feeling crushed with guilt for feeling that way.
Everyone around me thinks I have a healthy relationship with my illness (irony intended) because I’m so open about it. “My kidneys suck at being kidneys,” I’d say, chatting about hospital check-ups like they were a trip to the grocery store. I convinced everyone I was okay with being sick but the reality is that my confidence is a façade over layers of anxiety and guilt.
That’s not to say that humour isn’t helpful. And in some ways, I’ve even convinced myself that I’m okay with my illness and my stretchmarks. “I don’t have any body issues,” I think to myself.
So why is it that I’ve only worn shorts maybe three times since I was 13, despite living in the scorching Australian heat? Why do I keep trying different creams and oils that promise to make them fade and disappear?
There are days when I want the idiom about arrested development to be true, when I want to live out the rest of my life as the child I was when I was first diagnosed. Being sick as a child was a tangible, finite pain, compared to the amorphous, inexplicable distress of anxiety, guilt, and declining mental health.
But I know that’s not really what I want.
I don’t want to coat one type of pain with another. I want to accept myself.
About the author
Jharna Chamlagai is a Bhutanese-Nepali-British-Australian law/science university student. She is the 2018 Ethnocultural Officer at the Australian National University. She’s passionate about projecting intersectional experiences and voices. She loves reading and finding new and exciting ways to share stories.