Frankly, my dear .... thoughts on getting real

Being honest with yourself, your family, friends and relatives is a big step toward being happier and healthier. That’s my honest opinion. Remember wanting to roll your eyes the last time you visited the relative who is always a step behind the power curve and yet pretends that your visit caught her on the one day of her entire life when her house wasn’t perfect. Yeah. Right.

She’d be a lot happier if she’d just put up a sign like my great aunt Esther Ingebor Isackson Taylor had in her big old farm house next to the dairy in Utah -

Clean enough to be healthy, Dirty enough to be happy

In fact, everybody could just relax and have a good time - and quite pretending. It’s impossible for any of us to keep it all together all the time. And I’m just to that point in life that I’m not going to do it. It’s one of those ‘cancer taught me this’ lessons.

Some mornings, I don’t want to fuss with my hair just to go out and fetch the newspaper. Or put on a bra under my jammies - with the prosthesis - so that my neighbor who is inconveniently out at the same time getting his newspaper  won’t see that I only have one tit.

Don’t care. When somebody actually complements me for being on top of things and seemingly with it, I’m so grateful that I usually fess up to the mess that was just there five minutes before they rolled in. It gets a laugh.

My friend Veronica always says:

Without glasses there are no wrinkles and no dust.

I’m sure that some folks wish I’d be a little less painfully frank about everything. Yes, I have been arrested - a very long time ago. It’s a good story worthy of a fine glass of whiskey. In fact, whisky caused it. I have a neurotic aversion to talking on the telephone. I’d rather have dental work done. I don’t like being around drunks anymore, and really don’t like talking on the phone with a drunk - click. I’m incredibly fussy about food. I don’t shave my pits or legs very often anymore - and have trained my spouse to get over that. And yet, I’m quite vain.

I’m worried about those little vertical lines around my lip line. They make me look old.

I love to read late into the night. I don’t like much tee-vee and think most network tee-vee is beneath my intelligence. I spend too much on clothes. I think bathroom sounds are hysterically funny - fart in public and watch me collapse into a helpless heap of laughter. I read in the bathroom. I think I’ll need a face lift by age 60. I love to dig around in my ears with Q-tips. I’m an atheist, a cynic, and a skeptic. I think 95% of all contemporary music is crap. I’m very afraid of ever being fat again and I’m less afraid of my cancer coming back. I fear being trapped on a desert island with a TeaParty-er. And my hair usually looks stupid - but it’s just hair.

I also don’t have any time for hearing the same person’s problems over and over and over, when they have absolutely no intention in dealing with them or changing anything. Please go away.

See, this is liberating. It’s also dandy, and inexpensive, therapy. Now I can gossip about the foibles of others, having made my own public.

So, if you are keeping secrets from yourself and others - my question is: Why? Life is much richer when you breathe in and then out.

At the end of the day, you only have yourself to fear, and that person looking back at you in the mirror. Make peace with that person and you’ve made a huge step foward getting the rest of it whipped.

There’s your mental health moment for the day.

-maven