Chapter 242

“I could have all the tickets but one, and that other fellow would win.” - Earl

This statement had me howling with laughter and I couldn’t stop. My dad can say the funniest things you can’t imagine. Yes I said that right. But while these Southern ways of saying things can be very humorous, they hide a terrible underbelly, a mindset that makes or is made by the environment down here.

Its extremely negative. Negativity disguised as humor often enough, but nevertheless powerful negativity. When you start looking for it, you can see how in permeates all of the culture and all of the messages that parents and grandparents send their kids and grandkids. Of course the kids don’t know what they are getting, they are just getting what they are getting. Kids don’t get a choice.

Not until they are older. Sometimes much older. It takes a while to recognize the messages that you were fed as a child. Then it takes a while longer to assess those messages and decide if they are valid for you or not. Those are the two easy and objective steps in the process. The much messier and longer process is disempowering those messages internally.

I find that my internal dialogue can be just as powerfully negative as Earl’s statement above. While I have lots of practice hiding those thoughts and feelings, they are actually still in force somewhere in my mind or psyche. Overcoming that, now that is the real battle! I have to remind myself over and over and over again, that I don’t want to be like this, that I reject the possibility that I am destined to lose, that I refuse to believe that I don’t have a hope and a future.