What do Donny Osmond, Enrique Iglesias and I all have in common? Well, it is definitely not our wonderful ability to sing, but a secret that we carry inside of us each day. I was born with a condition called “situs inversus totalis,” in which all of my organs are on the opposite side of my body from where they’re supposed to be. From the moment I could understand what this meant, something clicked in my head and I realized that I was very different from everyone around me. The almost “backwards view on life” that my organs have given me has shown a clear disconnect between the rest of the world and myself.

Something specific that I’ve focused on in the past couple years is consistency. There are constants in our lives and there are plenty of things that just simply come and go. My organs being backwards is a constant, while something as simple as my friend group will never be. This idea of consistency first truly presented itself to me in July of 2016. Unfortunately, my mother had just passed away. So many people, even strangers, all entered my life at once. Some of them stayed for a week, maybe even two months, yet very few have stuck with me since then. It was tough for me to come to terms with the fact that people will never be a constant, and we will always only have ourselves forever. My parent wasn’t even a constant, and neither were the people who came and went in the following months.

Had this unfortunate event never happened, I don’t think that I would’ve understood what the words “self-reliant” actually meant. A person will never be here to stay, no matter how badly we hope they could be. I was forced to be prematurely self-reliant. I’ll always have myself, but I will never be able to fully trust if another person will stick by my side. My organs being backwards will live like that inside of me forever, one of the few constants I will always have. It’s okay and should be encouraged that we enjoy what we have at the moment, even if we have the mental capacity to understand that it will likely change after some time. But if we start living our lives based off of our inconsistencies, then we will never truly appreciate the most important of all constants: ourselves. I am my only constant. My organs will never change where they are. One day, my siblings who I think of as my best friends, will also pass away. My hair will go gray, I’ll move to another town, and I’ll have a few jobs in my lifetime. But my one constant is myself and the organ system I was given, and I couldn’t be more grateful that I live my life backwards.