Sunday Scribblings - Nemesis

I've given this some thought, and I can remember having a nemesis as a child. Her name was Amy and she was a part time "friend", full time enemy from the age of about 9 through to 13. Somehow we got to be friends when we were nine and I remember basically changing my personality to be more like her - and she was mean. I remember going around the playground with her and telling everyone not to play with a girl named Beth, because Amy didn't like her. I remember being shamed by a better person who told me not to be so mean and deliberately played with Beth so she wouldn't be alone.

Somehow, Amy and I stopped being friends. When we were 11, and about to leave our tiny primary school for highschool, I had my own best friend, and Amy had started to hang out with the popular group. In a truly mean girl way the popular girls had a mean plan to dump her right before highschool so she'd start high school without any friends. They did that, and even gave her a dog bone for Christmas. At the time I was glad, after all, she was my arch nemesis! But fate had a cruel trick to play, and now that Amy didn't have any friends, she came back wanting to sit with my friends and the new group we had. And so she did - and basically drove me out of that group to sit with some new friends, and in the process I lost my best friend. Of course the loss of my best friend wasn't Amy's fault, but it seemed like it at the time.

I met her a number of years later at our high school reunion. She'd lived a fairly hard life. Moved in with her boyfriend at 15, didn't finish high school and didn't appear to be doing a lot with the talent for song and dance she had shown as a child. We spoke briefly, but there was not much there of interest for me. She seemed lost, and when I think about it, she probably always was. Relentlessly searching, but more impatient than the rest of us. I wish her peace.

I don't have an archnemesis any more. I can't be bothered fighting with people I don't care about for things that just aren't that important. Actually, I think I am my own nemesis these days, and that makes me uncomfortable. I am the one sabotaging and defeating myself. I'm the one who doesn't believe in me. I'm the one who puts me down. Good God, I'm my own Amy!

I want that to change. I want to be my own friend rather than my own nemesis. I will be kind to myself instead of harsh. After all, if I am not my own friend, who will be? So raise your glasses of soda, ladies and gentlemen and let us make a toast - to being kind to yourself and defeating the nemesis within.

*clink*

Sunday Scribblings - Hero

I do not know what a hero is. I know I am not one, except perhaps to my golden retriever, Hopie. And that may be enough. I think parents are heroes. They take on the most important and unrelenting task in life and somehow make it work, the best they can. Survivors of grief are heroes. We watch our beloved die, watch their lives slip away to somewhere that the hearts beating in our chests and the electricity firing in our brains prevents us from following. And then, after suffering unimaginable loss and left with obscenely gaping holes in our lives, we preceed to get up every day. We breathe in and out all day long. We live, we laugh, we care.

That is perhaps the most heroic thing - to live life with hope, with some sense of purpose, after you have met Death. Death came to that room in my house, it stood there, as implacable and untouchable as the stars that sparkle in the place some call Heaven. No apology, no fanfare, no pain. And it just took him. Like it has millions of others. We only borrow our lives, I think. And we borrow with the knowledge that one day we'll die.

Dying is actually very easy, if you're the one doing the dying. If you're the one left behind, well then...that makes you the hero. To hear the song of life when you have heard the refrain in D Minor of death is a heroic deed in and of itself.