Everyday Canvas

Insecurity and Ahead of My Time

PROMPT: Tell us about a time when you were faced with one of your biggest insecurities, and how you got over it.

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The outcome of any insecurity is that we feel pressured and we don’t know why. This is how we ruin our lives and mental health. With some things, we can backtrack and redo and it works; with other things we have to learn new ways of being or relearn stuff.

One of my biggest insecurities had to do with the latter, which was keeping a clean house. To a degree, if I don’t keep it in check, that insecurity still sticks out its dirty neck, but I have learned to smack it on the head and send it back to where it came from.

There was a good reason for this insecurity, however. My mother never kept house. She managed the money and a few other things but she never cooked or cleaned. We always had other people doing those things for us. If anything, when I wanted to do things like that at an earlier age, the other people shooed me away.

Imagine my frustration when I got married and had to cook and clean. Cooking came easier. I managed it somehow. Cleaning not much so. I would clean one thing, one room, one floor, and the others would get dirty. It was a never-ending struggle. Then I figured it out; it was a matter of organization, something like a plan an administrator would come up with in a work situation. I also decided spotless didn’t amount to much and clean-enough was good-enough.

Not only that, I realized an unclean or somewhat messy place once in a while didn’t matter to anyone. This realization saved me. Nowadays, I don’t care at all if things are a bit askew, and they are so, more often than not.

Prompt: While sorting your wallet/purse, something about a ten-dollar bill catches your attention, despite being completely authentic why does the date say 2050?
" I'm worried, what if this doesn't go right? What if-"
or
" You talk too much."

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2050? Why a ten-dollar bill? I didn’t even go through the Stonehenge rocks like Claire in the Outlander Saga. What is this bill doing in my purse? Would they even have ten-dollar bills in 2050?

Questions, questions! But wait! If I am really in 2050, that means we’ve survived the 2016 elections with a good-for-nothing president, and the cataclysmic climate change didn’t happen, and no asteroid hit the earth, and human race survived.

All that is fantastic. But why am I still carrying a purse from 2016? I am so passé now. What will the people say? Could this ten-dollar bill buy me a new purse? I bet it wouldn’t even get me a plastic bag. Well, I think I’ll carry my antique bag around and flaunt it as if it were a collector's item or an objet d'art. Don’t they say if you got it, flaunt it?

So, turning to my husband, I say, " I'm worried, what if this doesn't go right? What if-"

He grimaces like always, like the times when he reads my mind. "You talk too much,” he says. “That ten-dollar bill is the play-money the neighbor’s grandkid was playing with, right here this morning, when you were babysitting for them when they went to the dentist."

Yeah, right! He still hasn’t caught on to the fact that we’ve time-travelled. Men! They just can't face reality.