Conventional Wisdom

He said that magic haunts the edges of the everyday. I totally believe that. That is, as much as any thirty year old single, childless woman can believe that magic haunts the edges of the everyday.

There is a lot of talk out there, people like Oprah, or my counselor - well basically it's common cultural knowledge nowadays - that you can control how you interpret what happens to you in your life.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and disagree. Completely.

While it is true that you can try to tell yourself a different story about what really happened, you will never believe it. You were born as a wilful animal, and that is what you will stay. And by wilful, I mean that your heart rules your head, and your heart is hard to convince of anything other than that which is pure, brute, inmaleable, real.

I am inherently rebelious. Even with the most stupid of things, my immediate response is to rebel. For instance, I refuse to address strangers on the street. No I will not say hello to you because I do not know you and your rules confine me I NEED FREEDOM FROM THE TYRANNY OF YOUR NEED TO SAY HELLO FOR NO IMMEDIATELY RECOGNIZABLE GOD-DAMN REASON.

So maybe that's it. I just can't change this animal nature. If so many people had not offered the advice to try to change my perceptions of reality, maybe I would have tried it on my own. I dunno. But now, it's too far gone. I'm too wiley, too contrary. Eff you, I say to all the wiser men and women of the world. Eff you. No matter what I tell myself to think of my circumstances, it does not change the cold, hard fact that I can barely pay my mortgage and still afford to buy food to nourish my body.

I don't know how to change that interpretation of reality without literally losing my mind.

Conventional wisdom is, as it turns out, really, really stupid and not at all useful for people who are out here on the margins.