this is me doing okay.

I found my first facial line.

There are three, actually. Very fine, but clear. One parallelling the curve of my upper right lip, the other two side-by-side at the left-hand corner of my mouth. I have been noticing for the past month or so that when I smile (yes, I check myself out in mirrors and my car windows when I'm unlocking the door) the smile quirks back into set, predestined curves. But then after a four-hour laugh session at Don Pablo's with the incorrigible and hilarious MP, I got home and noticed while getting ready to wash my face that the laugh lines...were still there. And I wasn't smiling.

A smile-free night of semi-restful sleep (I have just decided that my mattress sucks, which is the reason I wake up tired and sore every morning) found the lines...still there.

I have two feelings about this. The first is, of course, a combination of hollow regret and desperate panic (will I meet the man who wants to marry me BEFORE my skin collapses into dewlaps?) because I think, I'm not eighteen anymore. The fresh unworn skin is becoming a little less supple, a little more set, like overworked clay.

The other feeling is...pride. I hated being eighteen. I have always wanted to be a grown-up. I have always felt a little too old for my age (and have been told at least a thousand times that I am, even this year), and now I've reached the point where I've lived enough to have it carved, just the tiniest bit, into my skin. My body is beginning to catch up and take me where I've always wanted to go. And I'm proud because the lines, the first to appear and tell me that however young I am, I'm getting older, were born of laughter. In high school I had small white frown-spots at the corners of my mouth from not smiling, from feeling heavy-laden and sad; in college I started to shove away sadness and embrace joy. And the lines that tell me where the smile is going to go show me that I've won what is for me an old war. I have a leg up on time. I'm going into age laughing.

There are years of reasons why this is a miracle. I was reared in my adolescence by a fanatic youth pastor who taught me that I was horrible, who trained me to hate myself and to think that God hated me for not being perfect. I used to lie awake every night weeping, casting around in my mind for every single minute thing I had done wrong that day and desperately begging for God's forgiveness, believing he would cast me into hell and withhold his love from me because I was human. I believed for the entirety of the most formative years of my life that God detested me, was disappointed in me, would never be satisfied with me, thought I was disgusting, and loved me only in spite of myself because he was God but would much rather he didn't have to. I was afraid. I was in despair. I didn't particularly want to live. I didn't think I could make it on my own. I thought that if God could only love me because he was God, no one else could love me. I was alone.

But in college I learned that my fellow human beings could, and did, love me. And so did God. My favorite bathroom stall in North Hall my freshman year (left-hand side, second door from the front) had Zephaniah 3:17 hanging in it. Every time I took a pee, it affirmed to me in curly cheerful letters, "The LORD your God is with you, he is mighty to save. / He will take great delight in you, he will quiet you with his love, he will rejoice over you with singing." I started to uncurl my fingers and loosen my hold on the idea that I was worthless, good-for-nothing, better off dead. I began to laugh.

When my sister went through her debilitating illness, I learned to stave off the anguish and despair with laughter. Wild sometimes, hollow sometimes, forced sometimes, but still healing. Even when I was angriest at God, I found something I'd forgotten, something that vanished sometime after I turned eight. I found joy. And I held onto it. I met people I could laugh with, and I found faith that everything would work out.

And it has. It's not a happily-ever-after ending, of course -- not yet. But it's still good. When I was eighteen I had my whole life planned out. Now at twenty-four I don't have plans at all. None of them panned out the way I thought. And I couldn't be happier about it. Sure, there are nights when I wish my battered stuffed Eeyore was a solid, breathing, warm human man; sure, there are mornings when the thought of wiping one more horrible slug-dripping nose or changing one more shitty diaper or holding one more kid in the throes of a temper tantrum over something stupid like "It's time to brush your teeth" makes me want to pull the covers back over my head and deny the daylight; but at every moment I'm in a season. Something new is just around the corner.

Not all of it will be enjoyable (in fact I have an appointment after Thanksgiving to see if I have a stomach ulcer, which I doubt but who knows?), but everything will be okay. I'm doing what I didn't think possible, even two years ago: I'm relatively emotionally stable, I have a good job (which is getting better -- in mid-January I'm going to be, not Administrative Coordinator, but Director of Events, some Marketing, and some PR -- I'll be writing press releases and I get a thirty percent raise and an extra week of paid vacation and an office!!!), I find pleasure in living alone, I find pleasure in spending time with the few trusted friends I've made here. I find pleasure in being.

Yesterday I opened my Bible at random to Psalm 37: "If the LORD delights in a man's way, he makes his steps firm; though he stumble, he will not fall, for the LORD upholds him with his hand." Yesterday I laughed so hard with Marianne that my abs hurt more than they do after my daily workout. Yesterday I found my first facial lines. Today the lines were still there, and today I looked out my window at the hard, bright, shallow sunshine on the bare bright trees and I loved my life and this season and the God who brought me to it. I put on my coat, my favorite scarf, and my warm ugly gloves and went out into the day at the death of the year (this coldness before the snow flies, when the leaves are packed in sharp-smelling banks along the curb and the land is stark and bare, is my favorite time of year), and found Colette, and walked around the neighborhood, talking.

Maybe every second doesn't find me jumping up and down in elation -- that's not life. Maybe every morning doesn't find me burning with delight to be awake, maybe every afternoon doesn't find me suppressing a song because I'm filled to bursting with happiness. But every minute finds me alive. Every minute finds me upheld. And when I turn my faithful, as-yet-unrepaired old Earl nosefirst down the driveway wherever I'm going each day, I can look down the uneven bricks of Ashland St. and up at the flat November sky and think, I'm doing okay.

I'm not getting younger, and I'm not where I thought I would be. But where I am is better. Facial lines and all.