Hanging on by my Fingernails!

 It is the eve of my 46th birthday, and I want to tell you about possibly the most astonishing, unexpected thing that has happened to me in my more-than-four-and-a-half decades:

The scab is from the kitten. I have almost the exact scratch in my wedding photos 23 years ago, when the old deceased cat was a kitten.

After almost forty years, I have stopped biting my nails.

I have bitten my nails since I was seven years old, when someone told me that the piano teacher would cut your nails if they were too long. (That, at least, is the reason I remember. Who knows why we do what we do?) I'm almost afraid to say it out loud lest I jinx it, but the more I analyze that thought, the more I realize that it's a fear of accountability. So let me say it again:

I have stopped biting my nails.

I do not understand it, but from the timing, I guess that it has something to do with protein. Since I started  eating a metric ton of protein, both to support my daughter who needs it, and at the hest of the dietitian, food has become very dull. The fact that I can find and consume protein with a minimum of effort makes this a very first-world problem, and yet I grow weary of it, you know? I have lost almost ten pounds, some portion of which I can instantly regain if I increase my portion sizes of anything or decrease my protein intake. Currently I'm in a rut, waiting to break out of a plateau.

But I've stopped biting my nails.

"I will believe it's true," I said, hedging my bets, "if I make it through the show without biting my nails off." And my nails survived through tech week, through performance, through strike, through the week-and-a-half of postshow stress dreams. They survived Thanksgiving. They survived yesterday, when I microplaned my thumb while grating cheese and shaved off the top layer of my thumb nail. But I didn't shave my thumb! Because it was protected by a fingernail! 

(It turns out that fingernails won't protect you if you microplane your knuckle, however. At that point I decided we had enough cheese.)

I look down at my hands multiple times a day, to make sure that my nails are still there and still growing. And sometimes I just look in astonishment at my nails! on my own hands! I'm considering getting a manicure, because I can! 

Often, as I approach my birthday, I find myself fighting a malaise, as I consider how many things I have not done over the past year, and whether they would have mattered anyway. But this year, through no real action of my own, a thing has been done to and for me. My nails have grown, on their own, without my agency, without my doing anything except not biting them, which I didn't do on purpose. If I had felt the urge to bite, I certainly would have done so. I don't understand it. But it's the very definition of gift, unsought, unexpected, unhoped for because impossible. 

I have stopped biting my nails! Happy birthday to me!