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I’m Not A Celebrity Blogger. This realization comes to my door uninvited. I see him peeking in the window, trying to get my attention.
“Bugger off, damn it!” I yell at the door, not even wanting to open it a crack. INACB doesn’t seem to care. He turns the handle and steps through the threshold.
“Get the hell, out!” I continue yelling. “Didn’t you see the sign?” I point to the placard positioned carefully in the center of the door: NO UNINVITED EMOTIONS.
“But I’m not, uninvited,” he manages with a smile, “Your Insecurities dropped me an invitation last week and I’m been planning my big trip here ever since. In fact, I even got a reminder to show up from your Unmet Expectations.”
I look at him, in fear. I know that this particular message has big fangs. A weak part of me has invited this vampire right into my identity and I know he doesn’t want to leave until he has sucked my lifeblood dry.
I try a different tactic, “I really don’t have time to hang with you today. I’ve got some important things to do, places to go, people to see.”
“Really? he challenges. “I think you are trying to fool yourself; if your day was really going to be so significant you wouldn’t have noticed me standing outside in the first place.
He’s right. My day is chock full of projects that have nothing to do with keeping the Earth spinning on its axis. My tasks can be easily checked off in a box without anyone else taking notice.
“Let me tell you a story,” he says, holding his right hand up in the air. He uses the pointer finger from his left hand and signaled at the four elevated digits, giving each of them a name. “These four sisters are named, Pages, Visits, Downloads, and Links. Their brother, the thumb, has a name too. It is a short but powerful digit called Retweets.”
I open my mouth to try and tell him I’m too mature for finger puppet stories but he has curled all the Comparison Siblings together into a big fist and sucker punches me. I feel like panicking and I forget to breathe.
I’ve been beat up by this guy before. Sometimes he calls himself by different names, but I always recognize him by his self-pity aftershave. He’s called himself, “You Aren’t Good Enough,” in some variation most of my alert life. My Mom told me that I first met him as a toddler and referred to him as “Bump.”
I was born with a hemangioma on my forehead. It was a large bump about the size of a quarter It was quite noticeable, being red in color and protruding from my forehead. I was pretty self-aware of looking different. I gathered a lot of attention as a baby, walking at seven months and talking shortly thereafter. It didn’t hurt that I was a blonde headed, blue eyed child with a sweet disposition and smile. I was also perceptive. I knew when people’s faces morphed from cute-baby delight to uncomfortable curiosity that their gaze had settled on my mark. Before I was a year old, I’d respond to strangers’ looks in the grocery store by pointing to my forehead and acknowledging verbally what they were too polite to say, “Bump.”
(taken from “Of Bumps and Healing and Scars”)
His verbal attack begins:
- “Your creativity is spent after 1000 words.”
- “You don’t have what it takes to write one chapter of a book, let alone a dozen.”
- “You color too outside the lines with your writing for it to be considered pretty, or art.”
- “You are second rate.”
- “The Celebrity Bloggers, the real ones, think you are a pest.”
- “Nobody cares.”
I write down these tapes, messages that I’m all too familiar with. As I’ve been trained, I get out my red pen to cross out anything on the list that isn’t, or couldn’t, be true.
The pen stays capped through the first five. I think of other similar messages that could be added to this list.
But then I get to #6, cross it out, and look INACB square in the face.
“This one isn’t true.
“Prove it.”
“I care.”
“So…”
“I count! It’s my voice, it’s my blog. It’s my journey. It doesn’t have to be a Celebrity Blog.
INACB senses he is losing and takes one last desperate swing at me. “Then it should just be a private diary.”
The challenge hangs in the air. I’m unsure how to respond. I’m unsure of myself.
…
There is another knock on the door. It is friends who have dropped by for coffee and catching up. One hugs my neck. The other puts a terracotta pot of flowers on my porch.
She explains, “I’ve been following your story. I felt like I was supposed to get these for you so that when you head outside these doors on your journey you will see them and know that people are praying for you.”
I’m still letting it sink in. God sent me flowers today. I’m playing that tape over and over in my heart.
I’m Not A Celebrity Blogger took his leave having been knocked out of this identity crises with potted geraniums.
I’m Learning to Live Loved.