Mrs. Always Right

“You can be wrong when you’re right, even if you’re right on cue…” sing The Barr Brothers, Even the Darkness Has Arms, fed to me by Spotify, just as I sit down to write about being wrong (or not always right.)

This morning, after my short Yoga with Adriene practice, (see how I need to show how wonderful I am? Disgusting, isn’t it?), I cut up some tomatoes for breakfast. As I slice off a bruised part of the tomato, slicing sideways, from the stem side to the bottom, I discard the ‘bad’ piece, but then quickly flip the tomato on its side, so I will slice horizontally (in-between the stem and the bottom of the tomato. Why? Because this is the ‘right’ way to do it, of course!

Why right? Because that’s the way I learned to do it from my daddy, many years ago. This way, the pieces stay whole, the seeds stay anchored in place.  However, a few years ago, when I was making dinner with my friend Ina, she started slicing a tomato and I immediately interrupted her, telling her she was doing it ‘wrong.’ Why wrong? She asked me. I don’t like the seeds, so this way, I can get rid of them more easily. What’s wrong for me, was right for her.

Yesterday, I spoke to someone at school about how I was feeling, very disappointed after ‘not being allowed’ to go abroad for a work trip with colleagues which is planned for June, due to my partial stress/sick leave. “You tend to get excited about projects, don’t you?” He asked me. “To have waves of enthusiasm and then a down?” At first I felt very confronted by what he had observed over the 10 years I’ve been working there. But I quickly reviewed the many projects and initiatives I had started, and not always seen through to completion. I felt insulted, of course. It felt like an attack on who I am. I am, after all, a person of many ideas, and shifting moods and focus. Is that bad? Or wrong?

I just finished listening to Lee Harris’s Monthly Energy update. He talks about Momentum, Clarity and Release, for March 2019. And indeed, it is sometimes my momentum that gets me in trouble. I am not ‘wrong’ for being this way, but something about me, and the way I interact with the world is causing my stress and burnout. The company doctor has told me to ‘sit on the couch’ – something that is totally unintuitive to someone like me, who needs to have her curiosity constantly tickled. The seeds and the pulp of the tomato have to come together, not apart.

At times I feel deeply saddened by this change I’m going through, the road to recovery from burnout, the menopause, the deeper thoughts about life and whether what I’m doing now will be something I will look back on as an old woman and say, “Yes, I made the most of it.”  I said to my therapist last week, (and this made me cry), “I need to find out if I am just ‘handicapped’ and need to accept it, or if I can change and go to a higher level.”

Have I been ‘wrong’ my whole life? Living values which are not totally my own? Fed to me by my parents and society? And if so, what is the ‘right’ way to go now?

Alright, universe, here I am… tell me, please.