"So Now Sweet Sixteen's Turned Thirty One"~Bob Segar

Change that 31 to 40 and that’s me. In 1994 I was 23, recently honorably discharged from the Navy. I was full of ambition training for softball, found work waiting tables, Mobile Disc Jockey (picture) and a beer cart girl with an ass so perfect you could bounce a quarter off of it. I had just moved to Wisconsin and I was waiting for my freshman year of college to start. No signs of my upcoming battle with Scleroderma and Sarcoidosis except for that tingling in my fingers, which was only a nuisance back then.

Fast forward to 2010, I’m walking on a treadmill because it hurts to run. I’m not fat, but my ass is no longer in its prime (and that’s being VERY kind). I start daydreaming about what had happened to that hot chick I used to be. My hands once beautiful and played Stairway to Heaven on my guitar, were now fist like because of their contracted tendons. I became sad about loosing that, but I think as we grow older, all of us long for the beauty of our youth.

As I grieved for the hot chick, I started thinking about how as hot as I was- how underdeveloped my brain was as age 23. My walk on stubled on one of those “If had I knon then what I know now” moments. I kept plugging away at the treadmill and then I had an idea. What if the hot chick wasn’t gone? Maybe I had just become so terrified by what had happened to my young body I just shriveled up inside in a futile escape attempt from the shell that was once my strong body. I suddenly realized I have been going about this all wrong. I had been working so hard on the outside; I forgot to take care of what was inside. I’m not saying I should just take a meditative pose and stay there. I’ve just decided to start working from the inside out, rather than the outside in. I have to accept myself as a work in progress, not incapable. I have obstacles, but I have to forgive myself when they cannot be overcome. I need to start hiking in the foothills rather than trying to conquer Mount Everest.

So maybe you can't bounce a quarter off my ass, but I'm still the hot chick from the inside out. We all have an inner hot chick (or dude), you just have to remember to look.