Thanks, Trauma! And also, Lint Rollers

Hey there! Again with the restart, eh? Yeah. Well, there’s a lot to unpack but today the urge to write absolutely pounced on me and I decided to go with it.

Trauma. Every one of us has some. Whether your trauma is that time you cut your toenail too short and it hurt to wear shoes for a week, or you witnessed a fatal car crash, or you were relentlessly abused by a trusted family member, trauma is trauma is trauma. Just like strokes, there’s different traumas for different folks. Whatchutalkinbout, Jenny? 

So this morning, I was getting a darling Boden dress ready to package up and ship out, when I started thinking about my odd personality traits. Like, take my reselling habits, for example. 

I am obsessive about sending out perfect items. I will spend way too long on a pair of jeans that someone has paid $25 for…I’ll turn them inside out. Trim little threads. Use the sweater shaver on the LINING of the pockets. Yeah, those of you who have spent time with me in real life are undoubtedly laughing a little right now. Because I may come across as many things, but a perfectionist is probably not one of them.

It got me thinking what I might have been like if my life had been more “normal”. What if my parents hadn’t divorced? What if there was no evil stepdad who used me as a punching bag? What if I’d had a good marriage to a good man? 

These little quirks that manage to poke out like wispy feathers from a down coat make me think that in the Bizarro Alternate Universe there is a different Jenny, one who can let the tiny things go but who also probably has fewer tiny things to obsess about. 

This BAU Jenny (lol to all my Criminal Minds homies) is most likely an overachiever. She’s surely college educated and maybe even has a successful career in some sort of challenging and lofty profession. Advertising? Writing? I doubt it’s anything in the sciences because trauma free or not, this brain is not wired that way. 

I wonder if she’s fun to be around, though. Does she find the humor in the most unlikely places like I do? Can she make people smile during shitstorms? Because I can. And no matter how I got that skill, it’s one that I appreciate. 

We can’t go back in time. We can’t unscramble an egg. 

But what we can do, is make an omelette with that shit. 

I’ll have extra mushrooms in mine. 

And now back to that Boden dress. I swear I saw some lint in one of the pockets.

❤️