The Dysfunctional Family

So where were we when I finished up Part I? Did I tell you about how I conquered my OCD and became a model of mental health? No? Well, that's because it never happened. Actually the OCD just up and left me in my thirties. I don't know why because I wasn't taking any meds at the time that would diminish the constant rattling going on in my head. In fact the shrink who I was seeing couldn't explain it either. He mumbled something about getting older, and your brain is now coping with other more critical problems like what you're going to do for the rest of your life, but I really think I just couldn't hack the OCD any more. It made sense. Self-esteem wasn't my strong point, so I concluded that this was just another one of my growing list of failures. And without the OCD, I would be close to normal, whatever that was, and I'd have to give up my shrink and the other amenities of my lifestyle that I had gotten used to. Why was the OCD fading. I obsessed about...

Okay, I confess. I already have a real biography on my website www.janicearenofsky.com , but I also have what you might call a "shadow" biography. It details my emotional/spiritual/psychological events, in short, my mental state. I think it's only fair that if you're here to follow my daily blogging on various aspects of my person and what I think about other persons (like my sister, parents, and Donald Trump) that you know just what kind of a mind I really have. The web biography tells you that I'm an educated female who's written  a lot of stuff over the years in some prestigious publications. That's all true, but it hides the real me who wakes up each day with so many warts and all that no one actually wants to hear the details, which can involve anything including my first blankie and a certain walking/talking doll in a pink net evening gown. No one wants to hear juvenilia like that, and when I say "no one," I mean parents, friends, space cad...

His name was Tulip, and he had a terminal, incurable disease. Some kind of a horrible cat virus called Feline Something. I've never been good about learning the names of killer diseases--unlike my sister who insisted she was plagued with a bunch of them all through college and those fun years when she was raising her kids. It forced her to give up her dream of becoming "Cherry Ames, RN," For those of you too young to remember Cherry Ames, she was a drop-dead gorgeous nurse in  a series of young adult books in the '50s. My sister read all those books at least ten times, and they motivated her to go to nursing school and become a cruise nurse, a school nurse, a corporate nurse and a bunch of other life-saving roles. Obsessing about rare and incurable diseases distracted her from mapping out her career plans so  she had to table not only nursing school but all  other related health areas like phlebotomist and ear piercer. Just the sight of blood was enough to make h...