Color Blind

I sometimes wish that color blindness was a universal condition. It seems to me that in small and temporary doses it would do us a world of good.

Being green in a non-green world is scary. Other colors, the ones who can run and jump and play without fear of consequence, don't understand why you bruise so easily, why a fall or a twisted ankle could have drastic results or why the grown up colors are so protective of you. The hospital is not their second home and doctors are kindly old men who make house calls when your throat's sore, not expensive specialists in far away cities. Being green is different - you can't hide your color, can't change it, can't pretend it's not really green. It would help if there were someone else green to talk to, but you're a green girl, a one in a million genetic combination that mystifies the doctors, even the well meaning ones. At a young age, you already know that they would prefer to think that you're just dyed green and not a real color. Rather than listen and treat, they seem determined to wash out the dye and discover some other color, a blue or a lavender, some color they can understand and fix. Failing that, they issue dire warnings of future impairments and shortened life spans. They don't mean to be cruel or insensitive but they don't like feeling helpless anymore than you like being green. Check your tire pressure, fill up your tank and add a little oil to your defense mechanisms, green girl, it's going to be a long trip.

It's a little easier (and harder) when you go away to school - the university is filled with different colors and no one pays much attention to one more. You still have to be a little more careful than most but you begin to suspect that green may be a color of substance, a color that stands on its own and can make its own way. Green is tough and independent and defies the odds - much like crabgrass or an emerald - and there's a little of both in you. You find the strength you come from and draw on it, graduate, choose a career, and move on down the road. You spend too much time in hospitals and doctors offices but you're on the path to reconciliation with your color. Green you are and will always be, but there are worse and harsher colors.

You don't get to pick your color but you do choose how to wear it, whether wisely, with grace and determination or resentfully, with anger and self pity. The green girl I know - who has chosen grace and determination - still bruises from encounters with a hard edged world, is still more fragile than she would like and still spends too much time in hospitals and doctors offices. She's my cousin and her particular shade of green is congenital afibrinogenemia - hemophilia. To some, it's a color and a label, a lifestyle, a handicap. To me, it's what she overcomes in her search for self. She may be green but she wears the color well, reminding all that know and love her that she's a person first and green second.

We're not defined by our colors, only modified. We're defined by our willingness to see past them.

It's not easy being green

But green's the color of spring
And green can be cool and friendly-like
And green can be big like a mountain
Or important like a river
Or tall like a tree.

Kermit the Frog