Running With Scissors
Don't run with scissors. You could hurt yourself or somebody else, but most likely yourself. Holding pointy things in one hand and swinging your arms back and forth is just a recipe for stabbing or gouging unintentionally. It's really not a good idea. Running with a sharpened pencil is also a very bad idea and I know this from personal experience. Also having a steel, mechanical pencil in your pocket when you're running is a pretty bad idea and I also know that from personal experience. Keys can also leave a mark, and, you guessed it, I know from personal experience. It's pretty much just a great idea to put down anything sharp before you have to go anywhere unless you have a way of carrying around sharp objects safely. Sometimes that's easier said than done, like if you work in a kitchen or fight with knives for a living.
It's even harder, though, when the sharp objects that we are holding are memories of traumatic experiences that no one else can see and that we may not even know we are holding. We can be stumbling down the hallway of our lives with our arms full of broken glass and not even really be aware of it until we bump into someone, then come away from the experience covered in cuts and punctures. In that situation, it's highly likely that we will blame the other person as well for the damage done, even though we were the ones carrying the weapons that wounded us.
We may interact with someone who has the kindest of intentions and come away cut deeply. Imagine someone asking you out on a date who doesn’t realize that the last time you went on a date, you were in a terrible car accident, or you had severe diarrhea. What a painful reminder that would be! Or if your wife asks you how much your new laptop cost, thinking that she would like to get one for herself, but her inquiry triggers a fear response inside you about your finances. Your fear, based on growing up with never quite enough to eat as a kid and always getting the “you know we can’t afford that!” response from mom, may still be ready to go off as an adult, even if you are now financially stable with good work and saving habits. You may have blamed Mom for being poor or yourself for being greedy, or maybe you were teased at school for the state of your clothes, quality of your food, or worn-out and scuffed shoes. Maybe that still hurts to think about, and you long ago promised yourself that you would never be without enough money for something, not because you care what those stupid kids think about you, you tell yourself, but because you like nice things. Maybe you don’t really care about fitting in, but you just got tired of standing out. Now you work really hard to earn enough, cementing the belief that not having enough is always because of not working enough, so you constantly check in on yourself about whether you’re being lazy using your bank account as the yardstick. Then along comes your wife asking about how much that laptop cost you, spiking your fear. You can read between the lines, of course. You catch the insinuation that it cost too much, that you shouldn’t have bought it, that someone like you can’t afford something so nice, especially not on your salary, and if you had only taken that job in Topeka, like she wanted, this wouldn’t have been an issue. She doesn’t have to say any of this aloud for you to hear it all and know what she is communicating. She’s questioning your success as a provider and she’s no different from the kid that pointed out how the sole of your sneaker had begun to separate and would visibly flop and wobble as you walked. You know, the kid in middle school who laughed at you for having talking shoes while everyone was changing back into school clothes after PE, who then made sure to pump air into his stupid, awesome Nike’s using that rubber pump placed so prominently on the tongue of each shoe. Your wife has no right to talk to you that way after all that you have done for this family! After all that you have sacrificed!
Or maybe you ask your new neighbor if she would like some of the cookies that you just made and can’t possibly eat all by yourself, not knowing she has an armful of sharp memories about how critical her mother would be whenever she ate anything at all, and how she had just begun to feel some sense of control again over her food purchases and restrictive dieting. I think that you know where this is going.
Getting into an argument with someone, even a loved one, and being offended by something that they say or do will frequently occur because of something that happens inside of us rather than something that genuinely passed between us or was directed at us. Similarly, some of the most offensive insults that someone can throw at us may be the very things we believe and hate about ourselves or are the things that we are most afraid to be true about ourselves.
For your own sake, as soon as you can, take an inventory of your pockets and find a better place for the sharp objects. Talking with loved ones, friends, or a therapist about the pointy memories can go a very long way toward doing this, or at least toward rounding off the pointiest parts. So yeah, put the knives in the drawer, the pencils in your backpack, and the broken glass in the recycling. And for heaven’s sake, stop running with scissors.
