Pretending

I can’t pretend very well.  I think I used to be really good at pretending because I remember playing by myself a lot as a kid.  That statement could raise a lot of questions… to settle it I will just add that there was a large age gap between my sisters and I and so I had to come up with creative ways to pass the time without annoying my teenage sisters.  So yea, I think I was good at pretending.  Whether it was creating a soap opera with my Barbie dolls or playing against myself in basketball—do not judge—I liked creating a world that wasn’t a part of reality.  And by the way, every time I played myself in basketball, I won.  Just sayin’.  Somewhere a long the line,  I sadly lost this magnificent ability to pretend. 
Playing pretend as an adult is really frowned upon.  More or less, people think you are crazy.  This doesn’t mean that adults don’t pretend… but as an adult, pretending can more so be defined as lying or over exaggerating the truth.  We pretend to be people we are not.  We pretend to know all the answers.  We pretend we can handle more than we actually can.  We pretend to be more busy than we actually are.  We pretend that things don’t bother us when they actually do.  We pretend that life is worse on us than it actually is. 
Scratch what I said earlier about not being able to pretend.  I might be the guiltiest person alive when it comes to adult pretending.  My first thought and reason why I started this entry was to say that “I can’t pretend that physical pain doesn’t hurt” but now I think that I go the opposite way and I do pretend that it hurts worse than it really does.  Ah, caught. 
I recently have come down with a virus… one that I never expected to reveal itself in me until I was at least 78 years old.   Chicken pox has come and found me again, but this time in the form of shingles.  Out of all the illnesses I thought I would have the unfortunate contact with while living in Africa, shingles was never on my probability list.  But alas, here I am, 24 years old, chillin’ with my leftover pox.  I don’t know what you know about this virus, but it’s very odd.  It’s one of the only rashes that don’t itch and is painful.  It actually does nerve damage and can hurt years after the rash goes away.  The break out is on my right shoulder and chest and man it hurts (Not to over emphasize my pain).  The first day I learned that it was probably shingles, I cried a lot.  To my knowledge, the chicken pox virus was contagious, so shingles seemed like it would carry that characteristic as well.  My worst fear was that I would not be able to come to school the last 3 weeks (arguably the most important time of year) because I would be “untouchable”.  I got a miniature taste of what lepers felt like.  Take a deep breath.  Turns out, I am contagious, but only to people who have never had chicken pox and only if they come into contact with the infected area.  Solution- stay away from pregnant women and wear shirts that cover the grossness.  Done. 
If the worst case scenario would have come true (allowing my contagiousness to make me untouchable) I think I would have wallowed a lot more in my shingle skin.  The one thing that helps me to be positive is the fact that the pain hurts much less when I can be around people and not be seen as a huge virus.  So praise God for that!
My friend Hannah said very gleefully that there are many words that rhyme with shingle so I should write my blog as a poem!  This was her example poem in honor of my condition:
I decided to write a jingle
because I felt a tingle
and to my absolute horror
I found it was a shingle