Oh, fiddle-dee-dee!

My birthday is this month. I was eighteen twenty years ago. Recently, a few memories from that time hit me like a ton of fluff—fuzzy, yet with a familiar shape, but still weighed a ton and turned me into a puddle of splattered brain matter when it landed on my head.

I have the unusual ability to willfully lock away parts of my past that I find too cringe to contend with. I call it “doing a Scarlett O'Hara.” In my favorite book, Gone With The Wind, any time Scarlett was faced with a challenge she felt was too unpleasant or morally dubious, she would say, “I can't think about that now. I'll think about it tomorrow.”

I adopted this strategy as a little kid to help me deal with the constant ruminating I was plagued with every night as I tried to fall asleep. Eventually, these intrusive thoughts became amorphous shadows in my mind that often faded into obscurity. The dark is where the ugliest things can hide from our consciousness, and I never purposefully turn the light on.

Unfortunately (and rudely), someone or something does that for me and the memories explode from the nooks and crannies where I've carefully hidden them into the light where my conscious brain flies into a frenzy of boot stomping and butterfly nets trying to put everything back (or kill it outright) before I have a mental breakdown.

I do not recommend this method, as it takes constant mental energy to maintain and can be quite traumatic when a random stimulus triggers a jailbreak. Events like this are exceedingly rare for me (I've had almost thirty years of practice); however, this is still too frequent for my liking.

But it's been twenty years. I'm in a pretty good spot mentally, financially (almost), socially (with a few recent hiccups), and physically. Maybe it's time to unleash a few daemons at a time, come to terms with the insanity I struggled through in my late teens and early twenties, and clean out the attic.

Maybe a trip with some fancy fungi is in order?

Maybe…

But I can't think about that now. I'll think about it tomorrow.

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“Her face was paper white and her narrow eyes blazing like emeralds. He had never seen such fire in any girl's face, such a glow in anyone's eyes.”

“She looked furtively around her, as the treacherous, blasphemous thoughts rushed through her mind, fearful that someone might find them written clearly upon her face.”

“She isn't like these other silly fools who believe everything their mammas tell them and act on it, no matter how they feel. And conceal all their feelings and desires and little heartbreaks behind a lot of sweet words. I thought: Miss O'Hara is a girl of rare spirit. She knows what she wants and she doesn't mind speaking her mind—or throwing vases.”

“She had become adept at putting unpleasant thoughts out of her mind these days. She had learned to say, ‘I won't think of this or that bothersome thought now. I'll think about it tomorrow.’ Generally when tomorrow came, the thought either did not occur at all or it was so attenuated by the delay it was not very troublesome.”

~Gone With The Wind

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