and its only the first week

For lent, as a family, we chose to give up meat and chocolate.

It is 40 days and 40 nights of fasting.

We try and do lent most years and usually last the period. This year we chose to do it as a family.

And it is hard.

For now chocolate is the easier of the two.  But avoiding meat is a real challenge. It's only a few days in and I can't seem to think of recipes without bacon bits in, or chose a sandwich without ham on, or chose a stir fry lunch without chicken in. Meat is just simply everywhere.

We are also trying to avoid just cooking a usual meal without the meat in, as this is somehow noticeable. We are trying to thus cook vegetarian, using vegetarian recipes. Leaving out the meat just does not work.

Cooking vegeterian recipes requires time and patience.  Shifting food patterns takes time.

And the worst moment of the week was this morning at breakfast in a hotel. The choice of a full cooked english breakfast with my favourite bacon and sausages OR toast!

The toast it was :-(

How many days to go.......................

Ski hills and BBQ's

Every nation has its own little habits.  Things that they only do and that they think are absolutely normal. It often takes a foreigner to notice and point out, that this activitiy or tradition is unusual.

I experienced one such cultural norm last week and I have to confess, I adored it.  At first it seemed such a strange thing to do, but then again it's actually not, when you understand and experience it. 

The tradition I am referring to, is that of Norwegians to have a charcoal BBQ on a mountain during the lunch break of a a ski day.  

This is how it looked like. In the morning we would pack up the coal, the matches, the flasks of hot drinks and the all important (moose or reindeer) sausages. We would then take the gondola up the mountain, ski half way down, leave the rucksacks by the designated BBQ drums and ski away. Around noon, we would ski by the place again, and get the charcoals burning.  Some of us would then do one more run, and by the time we came by again, the sausages were ready to go on.  We would then enjoy a wonderful hot lunch of lovely grilled sausages, in the sunshine, with no queuing and no overpriced average food.  What a sensation!

Many people were doing it and it just looked terribly normal.

I loved it. And we did it multiple times.

I am not sure this would take off anywhere else and why should it? This is their tradition. Norwegian and wonderful.  

Sausage anyone?

So what did change?

Following my recent blog, about a celebrity alopecian saying the disease didn't change her, I received a few questions from you, asking what alopecia changed in me.

It's interesting as I knew this disease had changed me, but to actually articulate this, it took a while.

Here is what I believe it changed.

It changed the way I saw myself. Before alopecia, I had beautiful, thick, long, dark hair. Many people complimented me on my hair and I would have said it was my best feature. Once it was gone, I went through a form of identity crisis. Who was I without hair? Was I anything without hair? What was my best attribute now? Can someone without hair be beautiful?

Many such questions went through my head, every day new questions came into my head, many remaining unanswered.

Over time, I decided if hair is no longer defining me, what is? What can?

One of the first things I learned, and I belief had to learn, was how to wear make up. I needed to fill in the gaps where eyelashes had once been, I needed to distract attention from my hair (or lack of it) to my eyes. I chose to re discover my eyes. I learned to use colour differently. Purple and green tops, always bring comments about the beauty of my eyes. Before alopecia, no one commented on my eyes, now they do.

I also learned that my figure mattered, I was always blessed with not being overweight, but with a bit of focus and a lot of effort, I managed to create a figure that I had never had before and quite frankly never desired to have before.

Basically I found new things to become my attributes and to help me understand that I could still find beauty with my new world.

Finally and most importantly, alopecia opened me up. Not instantly, but over the last few years, it has begun teaching me about myself, my vulnerabilities and what talking about them can change. Not just for myself but for other people. 

Alopecia has allowed me to access other people in a new way, and I believe a more meaningful way. Do I wish I had never had alopecia? Absolutely. Would I trade the new me for the old one?

Never. 

Hardship brings gifts, you just sometimes have to look for them and wait a while.