From
Reading Room/7:
A Transformation
into Womanhood
—April Deller
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I must tell you of a most beautiful
miracle that has happened to me. I am not yet 25, nor am I dead, but I have
experienced the Resurrection. This resurrection is the same resurrection that
all young girls experience upon the cusp of womanhood, but at the age of nearly
23 it caught me quite unawares. It is not that I had never been informed of
this period of change in a young person’s life, but I had been told that
it would occur earlier, in one’s teenage years. In high school, I shrugged
my shoulders and took them at their word. I accepted that inside my teenage
body there were tiny little chemicals called “raging hormones” racing
around and causing havoc. Of course, I did not feel any particular change,
so I just assumed God had given me a special grace—and that my self-proclaimed
high spiritual values allowed me to rise above the carnal desires I saw at
work in many of my friends. Now, at the end of my delayed but arduous process
towards maturity, I recognize a different type of grace responsible for such
a late blossoming. I have learned to call it the grace of denial.
Denial is the first stage of dying. It can come in the form
of proactive disbelief or alarmed incredulity, such as exclaiming, “This can’t be happening
to me!” while scouring for evidence to the contrary, hoping that there
has been a mistake, a misunderstanding, that if you keep searching you will
soon find proof of your health and viability. Then there is the type of denial
that doesn’t even acknowledge the fact that a person may be dying. Nothing
gets through—neither kind nor harsh words, nor in fact, any words that
relate to what the person wants to deny. A person in denial doesn’t search
for evidence to disprove assertions of death; they simply continue on about
their busy days climbing mountains, slaying dragons, and propelling through
life without impediment. It is as if the words of foreboding were never spoken.
And, to their mind, it’s true. Those words never were spoken.
I was like this. I was a little seed in the ground, tightly
compact and smooth all around. I was warm and comfortable and I was quite content
with the darkness surrounding me. I was a seed—and that was how I intended to stay. I had
heard whispers that I wouldn’t remain a seed, but I chose to ignore them.
All around me there were seeds too, going through a process of decay. I had
no understanding of what was happening to them, and I had no interest. I was
a seed.
When I was a girl, I was such a strong woman. I was not fickle
or petulant, but levelheaded and consistent. I was not emotional or alarming,
but so simple and predictable, guided by practicality and logic. I was Lady
Willpower. And I was so proud. I could not understand the females around me,
why they acted as they did—one day wishing for the moon and the next day a valley. I
had no close girlfriends for the longest time, because I felt out of place.
I prided myself on being able to have straightforward, “just friends” relationships
with all of my male acquaintances. Being “one of the guys” myself,
it perplexed me that most women were not. I had no idea that I wasn’t
a woman.
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