Who's Your Narrator?

WHO IS NARRATING YOUR LIFE TODAY?

Is it you? Maybe not. See, we're all supposed to be doing something else right now.  Some of us know what that is.  We had plans. Plans for school, plans for work, plans and plans. Now what? Our plans are kaput and we are all at sixes and sevens.

Now that there is more time to listen to yourself, check it--what is being said?  Who is telling you what you should be doing at this moment? Is it your parents? Mom or dad could be lurking just below your conscious decisions.  Depending upon how old you are, he or she could be advocating a free love summer, or suggesting you dig a fallout shelter.  It might be your mother yelling at everyone like a screaming Mimi.  It could be Dad the Curmudgeon who won't talk, even though this is the first time you've spent any kind of decent time with the family. It could be the ex-hubs denigrating your perfectly good spouse, or is it that babymamma who warped you during your formative manhood years who won't leave your wife TF alone?

 Most of us are doing the best we can.  Some of us are doing what we have always done, and wondering what possibly could be the problem.

Who is telling you how you feel right now? You may be unconstrained by a time clock, yet still have a crap-ton of work to do.  What if all the norms that your creativity depends upon have been blown to smithereenies?  Are you secretly happy to not really be required to adult for the foreseeable future?  Reverting to a state of arrested development? Smoking, drinking, eating too much? Is that your uncle Ezra eating Doritos and ranch dip instead of going out into the back yard with the kids?  Maybe Cuzzin Punchie (She's my cuzzo, she'll punch you, too.) is thinkin' 'bout a dalliance with the boy next door. Don't let her persuade you. Y'all not nineteen no' mo'. I couldn't tell you Punchie Ricks real name if life depended upon it. Mean as a snake, sings like an angel. She only knows me by my fam name, "Nina," so maybe I pop up to talk sense now and again during HER stream of consciousness.

We have had just enough influence upon one another for it to be dangerous under the right conditions.  With your family, sibs, grandparents, the opportunities for negative imprinting are endless. If this person was sweet as saccharine in the streets, you may really have a blind spot regarding how their particular idiosyncrasy manifests in you as a personality glitch!

This will not do.  It's time to "catch hold," as my grandma Lucy would say.  This need to "catch hold" generally comes about during a season of discomfit--a time when things are changing faster than you can change along with them.  Then it is time to stand still, take stock, and reassess.

Are you taking care of things that others should be doing? 

Still? Now is the time to upset the apple cart. People will have TIME to get used to the New Normal, where folk don't just waltz past what you've always done in order to keep doing what they wanna do.  Don't do what I did--tell them. That is telegraphing your punch, and will only serve to engender the most stubborn resentment and refusal to cooperate. From grown people!  Just make a brutal, unvarnished survey of the current state of affairs in your household. Pick one thing that absolutely no one will notice you have changed, and change it.  Maybe you always have two cups of coffee in the morning. Cut down. Just because you can.  When you've done that, pick something else. Eliminate a time waster.  I can pedicure for an entire day, if I don't want to deal with life.  I'm not going to be doing that any more.

My mom was a life-destroying gossip. There are people I have to summon the courage to look in the eye, because MOM. They know it wasn't me, but if I were them, I wouldn't trust me either.  This is the petty, put-upon person who speaks to me when I'm bored and lonely and filled with resentment. 

SHE HAS GOT TO BE QUIET.

Until Miss Corona shut down my life, I was able to to avoid the situations in which Mom's bitter-pity-party inner monologue supplants my own.  Now is my opportunity to shut that divisive caterwaul out of my inner dialog for good.

I have made a start, and this has not been easy. Mom died three years ago. The last thing she did before descending to the dirt nap was take me off all her insurance policies, while leaving my children on them. They're waiting for big bux, and they think it's my fault they haven't gotten them; mom gets to devalue me from the grave.

Lucile started EVERY morning by getting on the phone and gossiping someone's reputation onto life support.  That person would get up and go about their day without any clue that Ms. Quinitchette had turned him or her into persona non grata.  

I lay on the other side of the wall and cringed.  Sometimes I cried. My mom was killing someone's reputation; curtailing their livelihood and social standing simply because she could. Some lady who just wore it better could wind up in her crosshairs.

I am not like this by nature. I say to your face what I've said to your retreating back, yo. Your good looks take nothing from mine. Still, if you hurt my feelings, Lucile starts talking to me about everything you could ever possibly mean by it. I get bogged down in that, rather than actually coping with your bullshit.

No more.  

If you've got to be here like this, buff out a character flaw.  Now is the time.  

I refuse to leave this time of tribulation without some solid lessons to build upon.