Thursday, April 14, 2011

Loosen the girdle.

For the girl who starts most of her conversations with her friends "Have I got a story for you!!" I'm feeling a bit disorientated. Little by little though I am realizing that things are not that different.
However, just the fear that things will change- dynamics, bonds, is enough to make this girl quake in her boots a bit. But little by little I am easing into Annie's world.
I know right down to my core that I am at the beginning of the tunnel, all I see is inky black in the distance. But somehow today I felt a little shift occuring. I got off my Budda on the mountain top aim for perfection, lost my tension and stepped freely into conversations. I didn't cover my ears internally, didn't feel my Catholic guilt creeping in for not getting it exactly right.

I feel it only fair to disclose that I am using lots of loopholes. Oodles of them.

My new favorite one is saying something not entirely pleasant but doing it with a smile and a little lilt to my voice.
See! I am being positive because I sound like Snow White!

There needs to be a little caution here don't you think?? Stepford wife could be around the corner if I am constantly channeling my inner Heidi on the mountaintop scene.

So... to feel the ick, acknowledge the ick, and then move the thoughts out and away from the ick...that is what I'm going for.  But it's going to take practice, discipline, patience and awareness. And probably not in that order. Add in heaping tablespoons of failing, flubbing and screwing up. Yes, I said the big one- failing, which is a big scary no-no in my repitoire. I think there is a sense, like when starting a new health regime, that you will be immune to illness, to the pratfalls and pain of life's situations because you are taking a new path. But healthy people still get sick. And our brains are wired to problem solve, so it's gonna go out to the store looking for problems. The million dollar question is; how do you think it feel it and steer away from the ick? Feels a bit like juggling.

I am lousy at juggling.

So here is my latest daydream. Annie, awakens slowly in her hospital room after the train wreck. Doctor by her bedside, ( he sounds like Jack Klugman's Quincy in my dream ) "You are paralyzed Annie, you may not walk again, you certainly won't shoot again and all I can say is I am so very sorry." She listens, feels the weight of his statement and smiles. Inhale in, steely look out. I dream that she makes her choice right then and there.

It's her ballgame and she is going to play.

3 comments:

  1. My grandmother lost one eye as a child. Her husband had an early version of Agent Orange syndrome called Jungle Rot; which made him sick for months at a time. She buried one of her three children. She was the primary breadwinner in the forties, fifties and sixties in Boston. She was the maid for the Assistant District Attorney; who, in his will, left her the first option to buy his home. Which she did. When she bought the home, she didn't know much about home maintenance, so...she bought the Time/Life series of books and taught herself. She became head cook for a school in Boston and at 95 the best lesson she ever taught me I pass on to my daughters. "You are who you are because you choose to be". Happiness is an internal choice. We all have our down and dour moments, Annie, it's what we choose to do with them that defines us. Thank you for another thought provoking post.

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  2. Good stuff Alex!

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