The better part of the time, I think I could act in most any of that famous neurotic director’s work—I am probably some kind of messy, type A gal. Wait–can you be on the sloppy side and still be type A? Most of the time, I could do with a chill pill and a maid.

I noticed my line of highly-neurotic thinking today. It went like this:
A. I have a headache.
B. Still have a headache.
C. I may be carrying some early stage of an aneurysm. I should get a scan every year to field it. (wait, would you want to know)?
D. If I die, my husband would probably remarry within the year, or three months.
E. I am just going to wallow in drinking my coffee, knowing an aneurysm may be on the five minute horizon. The new wife will be prettier and my kids will not hardly skip a beat. She will probably be neater, too.

You see??? What the heck. I am a shoe-in for Woody Allen fix, right?

And here is the part where I say, talking out loud, flicking on the light to this creative garbage is absolutely the way to go about getting out of the Eeyore ruts. You don’t really want to set the table to thoughts like that. You don’t really want to totally believe those ridiculous thoughts.

So I said it all, out loud, to my husband, and to our visiting friends. I gave them a little laugh and I got to move on. Those little fears can build up. You know those shampoo commercials that show old residue ruining whole groups of hair shafts? The fears wrap around each individual strand of hair and weigh down even the most naturally voluminous coifs. The fears should be dislodged, rinsed off before they get stuck under more scary thoughts. After all, they build. So. I’m gonna start a fear writing thing. I’ll be writing down the fears,  little and big; the Exxon Valdez fear spills and the small puddle fears. The sticky webs of terrible thinking fears that want to bead up and catch all the joy and faith thoughts, mummify them, and suck out the life.

Scary things like the dark. They like being unknown.

This is being brave sometimes: simply picking up your flashlight and flicking on the light.

So there, silly headache. And once the silly-no-way-that-is-logic string of thoughts are spoken out loud or read on a page, I can do what the best friends of neurotics do– that is, we must laugh and laugh until we know it is a joke.

Xoxox love and too much leftover chocolate cake,

Melissa