If you know me well, you would know that I am a very, very, VERY clean person. Sometimes borderline OCD, “don’t sit on my clean bed with your dirty pants!”, “don’t poop with my toothbrush sitting right there!”, kind of clean.
Cleanliness has always been something I have had control of. Cleanliness has always been the rash answer to all of my lifes problems. Have a bad day, take a shower. Have a long day, take a longer shower. Feel sick, take a hot shower. Everything in my life could be crumbling, but there’s nothing a shower and clean bed sheets couldn’t fix because when I feel clean physically, I feel better emotionally.
So, you can imagine, finding out I had a bad case of lice did not go over well with me. This was something that truly could not be fixed by a shower. Not even multiple showers.
We discovered this gnarly case of lice at 11 o’clock P.M. and did not finish going through every strand of my hair until 2 o’clock A.M. I had a lice kit on hand, thank God, so I started my first treatment at the crack of dawn because I refused to go to bed with live bugs in my hair. Thanks to my determined team mate, Brittany, she understood how much this affected me emotionally so she was as dedicated as one could possibly be digging into my scalp.
This case of lice HURT. I mean a girls scalp can only take so much beating. Four treatments later + Brittany pulling at my hair for hours = a scalp that is dryer than the desert and hurts to the touch. But even more than that, lice hurt my self esteem. My cleanliness was the only thing I had control of. On the race my schedule is pretty tight and most things aren’t in my control, so when the only thing I (thought) had control of was ripped out from under me, I was a gosh darn emotional wreck.
Through all of this, I have learned that everyone has their thing. My thing happens to be a fondness of daily showers and an irrational fear of getting lice. That is okay. What isn’t okay is running to the shower to “wash” off my problems after a bad day instead of bringing them to God.
I have been trying really, really hard to see what God wanted to teach me through this. Control. I am not in control. I am not in control.
I
AM
NOT
IN
CONTROL.
He opened my eyes to the city around me, specifically the Venezuelan refugee camp down the street. He reminded me that lice is not detrimental and that I have so many resources to take care of it. That I am not dirty (I actually got lice because my hair is so clean, wuutttt). That I am not in control of literally anything, even the tiny, nasty, lil’ dudes in my hair.
Soooo, in conclusion, my team and I will now be doing lice checks once a week. I have decided to fast from showering for a week, hahahahah just kidding. But, I am learning how to get over my entitlement to daily showering and how to balance my current standard of cleanliness with a more realistic one. Fingers crossed it doesn’t take another case of lice to remind me that I am not in control.
Let’s Chat:
Email: [email protected]
Insta: @savannathomass
Blog: savannathomas.theworldrace.org
