Today is a day for putting my feet up. Mostly because putting them down causes the blood to rush to the giant blisters forming after yesterday’s overly ambitious dog walk up and down the torture trails the locals quaintly call “hills”. I thought I was finally experiencing those famed exercise endorphins all the fitness-geeks rave about until I realized it was just the rarified air causing my light-headed euphoria.
It’s also Monday, meaning the start of a much needed new week. Last week was all about learning experiences. Really painful ones that leave me with glaring reminders of what a flawed person I am. Glaring. As in, neon signs pointing directly at my head.
It started off with a humiliating and ultimately humbling reminder that as much as I pride myself on thinking before speaking, even I am not immune to the “post in haste, repent at leisure” phenomena that is the product of narrow thinking and internet access. I’m not going to rehash details, but suffice it to say, a “virtual” statement yielded real world damage.
In public, I dealt with it by retracting my statement, posting a clarification and apology (sans excuses, because I recognize the difference) and submitting said apology to the injured party via email with full intent to back it up the next time we meet face-to-face.
In private, I came very close to vomiting from the guilt and shame. WHAT was I thinking? Clearly, I wasn’t, and because thinking before you speak is such a huge deal to me, the emotional fallout was equally epic.
Added to the earned shame is the just-as-bad-if-not-more-so horror of embarrassment - a quirk of my personality that I’ve been struggling with since I was a child. To be publicly embarrassed... as a kid I had absolutely no coping skills for that social situation. None. Zippo. Zilch.
I don’t just mean that I found the sensation unpleasant. We all do. I mean that even good-natured teasing left me rigid with abject fear. Of what, I have no idea. I just remember that even if I did something unintentionally funny, instead of developing my sense of humor and feeling a part of this greater experience some call, oh, THE HUMAN RACE, I often cried with fear over the outcome.
When I was really little (I guess 4 or 5?) I got a teddy bear and a bath set of grooming stuff (shampoo, lotion) at the same time. So I set about to give my teddy bear a bath. Adorable, right? Sure, to a normal adult and parent. But for years I lived with the memory of all the adults in the room rushing to stop me, their cries of “Oh, no!” booming in my kindergarten ears, and the crushing mortification I felt in my chest under all that attention. I wasn’t in trouble. Reflecting on those adults with my now-adult sensibilities, I can safely say that there wasn’t an undue amount fuss made over it. But the episode is burned into my memory as one of the most painful of my young life. And it’s not as though I don’t have a selection of painful experiences to choose from, so clearly there’s some bad wiring of the brain, there.
Anyway, my perspective did not get better as I tumbled through my adolescence and I’m not even sure how I survived being a teenager at all. I think it had something to do with cloaking myself in a thick cloud of dour intellectualism and pot smoke. Mystery of loner status: solved.
Learning to laugh at myself was a slow and self-taught process facilitated by motherhood and my few close friends. It comes a lot easier than it used to. But there are times when it is utterly beyond my reach, and when that happens the mostly disused but still well-worn paths of terror and guilt swell up before me, cutting off all other means of escape. Last week they were there, leading me to a familiar dark place that I only just barely avoided before lesson #2 body slammed me from out of nowhere.
The circumstances of lesson #2 are actually still in play and I have a superstitious fear of going into too much detail lest I karmically unbalance the delicate victory we are (hopefully) experiencing. The upshot is that the deal on our house very, very nearly slipped through our fingers. And when I say “very nearly” I mean that Randy and I had already started formulating a plan B - one that did NOT include home ownership, and DID include protecting ourselves from a possible lawsuit.
The important thing to note about this situation is that it was through absolutely no fault of our own. I really can’t stress this enough, because it’s at the heart of lesson #2 and is the reason for one of those aforementioned neon signs blinking its garish neener-neener at my head.
As the new reality of our dire circumstances was sinking in, as my husband valiantly strove to problem-solve, even as an ocean’s volume of salt water poured out of my eyes and dripped all over my shirt... as all this was going on, my prevailing emotion was relief.
Relief that the other shoe had finally dropped. A sense of rightness came over me, a feeling of justice being served or of my universe being restored to balance. It was brief, this relief, because a shit-ton of worry for my family was hot on its heels, but it was there.
And that’s lesson #2 - that no matter how hard I try, how grandiosely I brandish that sword of self-esteem, the first voice in my head is the one telling me I don’t deserve it. I don’t deserve good, stable things like my own home. Singing two-part harmony with this voice, this Arbiter of Impossible Virtue, was a sniggering little whisper who gleefully planned to tell all those people who were supporting me that they were wrong! It was going to take vicious, brutal pleasure in informing every single one of them that their opinions were worthless and they were idiots for supporting me.
It’s not just that I’m hard on myself, or hold myself to a high standard in certain areas. I am and I do, and I don’t necessarily see that as a bad thing. Especially when it’s balanced by a healthy dose of unconcern about things beyond my control. No, this was something far more insidious. This was a deep seated, gut reaction that good things are too hard to deal with and bad things are the rightful state of my reality.
The lesson isn’t that the voice is there. She’s an old, familiar companion. The lesson is that I clearly haven’t STOMPED THAT BITCH INTO OBLIVION like I thought I had.
I have a good handle on the idea of cause and effect. When I can draw a line between a job well done and a favorable outcome, I feel deserving of praise. The converse is also true. But, again, this was a situation utterly beyond deserving or not. It was like sitting at a poker table with everybody all in, staring at a full house in your hand, only to be told that it’s just been unanimously decided that your hand is an instant disqualification in the game. And then the Arbiter of Impossible Virtue tells you that not only should’ve you known that in the first place, but here is a stick to beat yourself with - go to it. AND THEN YOU SAY, THANK YOU MA’AM, CAN I HAVE ANOTHER!
It’s pretty obvious that this illogical bitch is a waste of time. No rational thinking person would give her the time of day. I’m proud to say that I’m a rational thinking person... most of the time. But her trick, the secret to her past success in my life, is that she rides this wave of relief. Everybody likes relief - it’s the freedom from stress, a freedom so acute as to be almost euphoric. Relief is the endorphin equivalent to a master key - it opens you up to all sorts of stupid suggestions, like the idea that you’re better off without good things.
This is not me fishing for reassurance. In fact, one of the most frustrating experiences is to have other people tell me I’m deserving. First of all, how would you know? Secondly, I ALREADY KNOW IT. Thirdly, it doesn’t matter how often my ears hear it, the Arbiter of Impossible Virtue never does. And she’ll be there long after you’re gone. It is up to me to gag and hogtie that hateful harridan, then shoot her in the head. Then burn her corpse, just to be sure. Maybe dissolve her ashes in some kind of caustic liquid.
The point is, during the cogent light of day I am full of righteous indignation for the injustice dealt to us. But the lesson about not forgetting what voices lurk beneath vulnerability is as bright as a neon sign. Two of them, reminding me that some battles are just never won.




