Giving Pessimistic Petunia a New Job in My Brain Because She’s Making Me Nuts
I have the flu.
(I wrote “I have the glue” first by mistake. I think that is hilarious. Part of me wants to build a whole post around having the glue, but that part is losing out to the bigger part that wants to write about Petunia.)
Part of having the flu, for me, is not wanting to do much. The thing with not doing much is then the voices in my head are a lot easier to hear because I’m not distracted.
Jeeeeeeeesus.
This one voice, Pessimistic Petunia, does this thing were she lists all the things that are going wrong, all the things that did go wrong, and all the things that might or will probably go wrong in the future. She is Caption Freakout. Captain Chicken Little. Captain The World is a Shitshow and It’s All Headed Our Way.
She worries my fly is down when I’m wearing a nightgown. She has a field day with the state of our world. The current administration is ten million ticks on a dog’s back to her, and we’re the dog. Everything bites, sucks our blood, wants to eat us alive, is eating us alive.
She seems to like this kind of disaster thinking because she gets super anxious when it’s a sunny day with no clouds—she’s like a person about to take a ride on a roller coaster without the safety bar in place when things are easy and smooth. She’s like WTF with all this calm? What am I supposed to do now? This is awful.
She gets in the pitcher’s box and warms up: The banks are going to crash and your money sill disappear. You should started lifting weights ten years ago. Your bones are probably thin as toilet paper by now.
She is relentless. She is all warmed up by bedtime and really drills down when I turn off the light.
But last night as she snowstormed me with things to worry about, I had a thought: What if I changed her job description? What if her job is to create movie clips of imagined wonderful things that could happen to/for me? What if her job is to be creative in a new way, in a way that is fun for me, and therefore, perhaps, also fun for her?
She’s now the assigned movie maker of 10,000 possible delights por moi. Her new name could be Paramount Petunia, the imaginer of good dreams. She imagined Glennon and Abby and Amanda having a guest on We Can Do Hard Things who mentioned You Don’t Look Adopted. She imagined these three women going down a rabbit hole of me right there on their podcast! She imagined Glennon herself phoning me, asking if I would be on their show. I myself stepped into this dream and said YES!
Paramount Petunia is new to this gig, and so I have to kind of herd her the way Bird herds me by poking his nose into my leg when he wants to go out. I have to herd P.P. to head for the doorway of delights time and time again because, like all of us, she falls into old patterns pretty quickly and starts rattling off breast cancer statics, trying to keep me in line, afraid and small, and, in her mind, safe.
No, no, no, P.P. I have to say. I want glitter. I want to be in Paris. I want money to fall from the sky. I want frogs to dance when I walk by. I want it all, the whole garden of eartthly delights, and it’s your job to make sure I imagine these things.
There’s no such thing as a free lunch, P.P., I tell her. You have to work. When I go to the coffee shop, she imagines for me that everyone is going to applaud when I enter. That’s fun, I tell her. Thank you. When I drive down 109 to get to Hale to walk in the woods, she imagines I’m going to meet the love of my life when I park my car. Oh, cool, I tell her. I didn’t even brush my hair! It doesn’t matter that these things don’t happen, is what I’m finding. What matters is that everything is something to look forward to because who knows what will happen next. Who the hell knows what this wild P.P. has in store for me? Who knows? My brain is hilarious. It doesn’t even know the difference between what I imagine and what is real, anyway.
You go, P.P. Rip it up.
Game on.
