OCD

Thank to TV, we now know all the jargon, and what we used to attribute to someone's personality, we now diagnose as a disorder. Thus, when Fio's friend dropped everything and moved out of state only to return four months later, Fio attributed her actions to ADD rather than impulsiveness.

But what about Fiorella, who plans every moment of her day?  Fio's friend may be impulsive, but she herself is compulsive.  Why else would anyone write a blog every day for more than seven years straight?

Fio, the Killer

Fiorella has traced that guilt she told you about--deep inside herself, she still believes that, when she was a very young child, she killed her grandmother.

She's told you about it before, how, as her grandmother lay dying, Fiorella was told to stay in the large foyer outside the front room.  She remembers staring at the umbrella stand, at the front door, the stairs, and around at the empty room, and she knew her grandmother was in bed in the room off the other side of the front room.

Fio can only guess that, because she was alone, she probably entertained herself by singing.

Someone came through the door--a woman whom Fio, of course, cannot identify--and told her she should be quiet because her grandmother was dying. So when Grandma passed on soon afterwards, Fiorella assumed she had killed her by making noise in the foyer.

Yes, she actually believed she was a murderer, and she kept her horrible secret for forty years--until she finally faced the memory and realized there was no way a child could kill a person by making noise.

Unfortunately, though, the belief is still embedded in Fio's psyche.

But strangely enough, it has helped Fio become a better person than she might have been otherwise.  She knew she had to tread the straight and narrow because she had already committed such a terrible crime, a crime she had escaped rightful punishment for. It also gave an overload of responsibility because she apparently had great power.  Yes, Fiorella is out to save the world.

A final thought.  After looking at the dates, Fiorella told you it was her grandmother who was dying, which occurred when Fiorella was four and a half.  But through the years, she always thought it was her great-grandmother who was dying, which occurred when Fio was two and a half.

Take your choice.

Defining Fio

Fiorella apologizes for all the dumb, thoughtless, embarrassing, and insensitive things she's ever done or said in her life, the things that infiltrate her spare moments and haunt her dreams.  Fio's an overflowing cornucopia of faux pas, but she can assure you she's never been purposefully cruel or mean.  And that she always tries to help.

Fiorella will state her viewpoint, but she is not a fighter.  In fact, she rarely even gets angry.  It just isn't worth it.  Arguing never changes a person's viewpoint--it just makes Fio feel sick to her stomach and leaves the other person more adamant than ever.

Fiorella is a good time gal, and she likes to be around enjoyable people.  Laughter scares off demons, improves the digestion, and stimulates the brain.

Fio in Full Bloom

Watch out, world! Fiorella feels good today! She reported Lenovo to BBB last night, and this afternoon she'll send off letters to all eighteen of its Board members. And she's working away on a rewrite of chapters five and six of one of her older manuscripts. And she's going to exercise and eat well and go out to eat with Husband at a fish place tonight. Then she's going to save the world.

Manic episode, anyone?

To Help, Not to Rescue

Friend Janece, a psychologist, explained it all to Fio. She says Fiorella is a born rescuer, as indicated by some of her dreams, and that Fio should consider pulling back. Helping is okay, but out-and-out rescuing is not good for Fio or the object of her attentions.

It's like the old Chinese adage--Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.

Confession

My name is Fiorella and I am a hoarder.

Yes, Fio has been watching that TV show about hoarders and realized that, in her own way, she is one too. Oh, her house may be a little too full of stuff she cannot bear to part with for sentimental reasons, but her major sin is word hoarding.

Yes, Fio cannot bear to throw away anything she has written, and the pages are everywhere--on her desk, in bookshelves, in file drawers, on the Internet. In fact, she cannot even bring herself to delete her seemingly golden words when she is writing novels and has to edit herself. Instead, she copies the useless verbiage to another file, telling herself she will use it somewhere later. Which she never does.

But that's what hoarding is about--possibility, not prose.

As Charged

Fio has an exaggerated sense of guilt, perhaps the natural consequence of being brought up Missouri Synod Lutheran.

For years she thought that when she was three years old, she had killed her great-grandmother by talking too much. And she has fretted for a decade about having signed the release for her father's brain operation, which didn't help much and may even have made matters worse. And now she wonders if the reason he finally died at age ninety-five was because she didn't visit him for almost two weeks--she had the flu.

And then there are the students she should have handled better, and her own children, all of whose problems she lays at her own feet.

Of course, all this guilt also implies a sense of power and control.

Yesterday, Husband couldn't find The Wall Street Journal when he came home from work. Fio realized that she must have thrown it away. In fact, the more she thought about it, she had a dim but growing memory of tossing it.

Today the newspaper carrier delivered two WSJs because he missed yesterday.

So much for power and control.

Getting After It

Fiorella is currently laboring over the umpteenth revision of her latest manuscript. Yes, Fio believes that practice makes perfect, which goes hand in hand with her somewhat obsessive personality.

She demonstrates the same behavior in everything she does. Her paintings are built up of layer after layer of experimenting, adjusting, correcting, and then doing the same thing all over again. Her poems are constructed the same way, as is--Fiorella!

And that's why Fiorella hopes for reincarnation. One of these lives, she wants to build up enough experience to get it right

Perspective

People believe what they want to believe.

Some people insist the Holocaust never happened. Others insist that George W. Bush was the best president ever. Still others say the moon landing was filmed in Arizona.

And Fiorella describes herself as young, slender, and beautiful.

Wild Child

Fiorella grew up in a house in which there was a place for everything and everything was in its place. Except, of course, for Fio. As her father informed her years later, she was their "wild child."

Now, this isn't to say that Fio doesn't like stability. To the contrary, she adores stability, clings to stability, strives for stability. Thus she avoids cooking or cleaning house--meals are eaten and gone while houses rapidly get dirty again. On the other hand, compositions, whether in art or music or literature, are stable. They don't self-combust.

Let's face it: Fio likes stability in her life because she herself is so unstable.

Split Personality

The atmosphere at the recent RWA meetings has been getting a little raunchy lately so President Emma sent a tactful note out on the loop suggesting everyone tone it down. Immediately Fio's good twin contacted Emma, apologizing for anything she might have said or done to contribute to the problem. As soon as Good Twin received Emma's soothing reply, Fio's bad twin took over, telling Emma that she planned to wear a tee with naked breasts printed on it to the next meeting.

Swinging between Lutheran guilt and adolescent rebellion--that's our Fio!

Lil Red

I've often thought that the story of Little Red Ridinghood is an analogy to the human condition. Like her "grandmother," we are all wild creatures beneath our clothes.

Our clothes are the cultural roles we take on, "mother" being one of them. We all know what a mother's roles is: kind, loving, supportive, etc. But I don't think any of us can escape the fact that beneath the stereotype, which most of us try our darndest to fulfill, we are ourselves, our naked, feral, savage selves. Yes, darling children, I carry anger, spite, even malice, within me.

I must tell you that when I proposed this theory to a psychologist I was seeing at the time, she gave me a look of absolute horror and set up several more sessions.