Phantom Attacks

A little while back I thought I got lice.

It all stemmed from me and my roommate going to the movies and her telling me the story that she once got lice from a theater seat so not to lean back on the chairs or rest my head.

Of course halfway through the movie I realized I was resting all the way back.  We went to watch Star Wars; that’s a long movie & the seats were comfy, so for the next few weeks I thought every scalp tingle was the invasion starting up.

I was so nervous about getting lice that I even did small “home remedies” (tea tree oil in the shampoo, washing my pillows/sheets in super hot water) so I wouldn’t have to bust out the full Nix treatment and quarantine myself just on the off chance she was right and the movie theater gave me lice.  I finally broke down, told my roommate she Inception’ed me, and asked her to check my scalp and make sure I didn’t have a colony moving in upstairs, which I didn’t.

First off, sorry that if in talking about lice and head scratching it has made you inadvertently itchy.  But now you can more fully empathize with the situation I was in…you’re welcome.

But really the whole situation made me think of how we not only take in the things that people say, but it can actually take root to where we adopt ideas that we weren’t meant to take hold of.  This is something I’ve wrestled with, as I’m sure most people have, for the majority of my life.  These crazy ideas about who I am based off of what others have said.

A surface level example of this is that I’ve always been tall and I really took notice of it probably about third grade.  I was taller than most of the other girls and definitely taller than a lot of the boys.  It wasn’t until high school that I started to be the same height as some girls and have some boys taller than me.  I was referred to as a giant or Amazonian, and not in good ways.  For a while I had the worst posture because I was always trying to make myself smaller than I was so I could be like everyone else.  I was made to feel ashamed of my height and therefore acted in a way to compensate, cover up, or minimize myself.

Again, this is a small outward example.  I could easily point to other things relating to body image or even my personality that others have made me feel like I need to change for one reason or another.  What is it for you?  Maybe it’s something on the outside: your weight, your size, or your looks.  But perhaps you wrestle with something deeper: your intelligence, your attitude, your upbringing, or your worth.  Something that someone said to you that gives you these phantom itches of who you are, making you self-conscious in your day-to-day.

Truth is with lice, as well as those deep issues we face, is it’s only upon closer inspection that we can really know.  Is there a truth we need to make remedy for or is it a case of taking on things we weren’t meant to?  So much of the process of shedding these phantom lice attacks is to know if the lice are really there?

Good news, whether they are & you treat them or you were Inception’ed as I was, my encouragement to each of us is that we Nix the itches that would tell us we are infected.  And hopefully it’s the Hiroshima of counter attacks—destroying the remnants of future invasions.  That we walk in freedom instead of fear and not carry the burden that we have been somehow contaminated and are therefore less than we are.  That today, more than yesterday we have the space and freedom to wear our hair down.

Until next time…Live as a Masterpiece!