I Think I Can, I Think I Can

The other day I walked into my kitchen full of dirty dishes and saw a roach. To say the elephant is afraid of the mouse here is a drastic understatement. In quick action I grabbed my fly swatter and tried to convince myself I had the guts to whack it, but it was hiding. I quaked inside. I looked at the clock to see how long before my husband would be home from work. Hours. I jumped up and down and squealed like a little girl and felt a million roaches scattering across my body. Then I got a grip and dug out the Raid under the sink the roach was hanging out in, certain it crawled into my hair while I was doing so. So there I waited, quaking inside with a fly swatter in one hand and can of Raid in the other. Who says urban living ain't grand!

Needless to say the elephant won this round. So I set out to clean up the massive mess of overturned dishes soaked in Raid strewn about the counter. Sadly I lamented the days of leaving my dishes for later had finally come to a close. I washed and Lysol'd and swept and even cleaned the burner pans on the stove. No crumb was getting by me, least I see another creepy crawly and know there was something I could have done to prevent it! Then I moved on do do something else, but kept seeing insects scurrying around my house out of the corner of my eye. I became convinced they were emerging from every drain and between every wall crevice. Soon they were going to overtake my living space! So I had to do it again. I told myself, quite loudly in fact, that there were no insects in my house. There never were going to be insects in my house. I didn't see them and they weren't there. In fact they didn't factor into my life at all and were completely irrelevant to my existence. Flipping my brain to positive thinking was hard but I kept repeating it and sure enough eventually stopped tripping out like an adolescent waiting for the phone to ring. 

With startling clarity I remembered another time when my thoughts had to precipitate something actually happening. In fact I don't think it would have happened any other way. When I was living in San Francisco I could barely make it down three flights of stairs to take my dog out. I was disabled and broken and confused and scared and angry. Nobody knew how to help me and my life was quickly slipping away. The harder I tried to overcome it the sicker I got. Everyone had suggestions and plenty of criticism, but absolutely nothing of value to contribute to my situation. They just didn't understand, hell I didn't understand! But the line in the sand was before me. I either had to lie down and fade away or come up for air swinging. So I picked up a mantra and with more hurt and pain than I knew one person could even feel, repeated it over and over again every hour of every day for weeks and months until I was ready to figure out how to make it come true. I will get better. Today I may not be who I was before I got sick. But the woman who could hardly make it back up those three flights of stairs and had to stop on every landing to gather her strength, she just ran a mile this morning. Well most of one.

Thanks for joining,

Leah