Rationally Speaking

When I was a kid, I had migraine headaches ... really bad migraine headaches. I vividly remember writhing in my bed while Mom would alternate between placing ice packs around my head and pressing encyclopedias against my throbbing skull. And no, she wasn't hoping I would absorb some knowledge from the books ... the weight of them helped to equalize the pressure inside of my head ... I know it sounds weird, but it helped to ease the pain ... no, really, it did. Those headaches coupled with my ... um ... my ... um ... less than stellar behavior when I was in elementary school eventually led to all kinds of appointments with several types of doctors. Translated ... first, they thought I had a brain tumor and then they thought I was crazy. It turned out that neither of those supposed culprits were the cause of my headaches or my mischievous actions ... food allergies were triggering the headaches, and my acting out was caused by boredom because I wasn't being challenged enough in school. Once the offending foods were removed from my diet and I was given extra reading and special projects at school, I stopped getting headaches, stopped getting into trouble all the time, and started growing and learning. Well, at least until I hit high school anyway and then I managed to find my fair share of trouble once again.

I hadn't thought about the "headache" years of my life for a while, for a really long while in fact. And then in 2010, one of the doctors I was seeing when I was struggling to get enough liquid into my body asked me if I had ever taken an IQ test. My mind immediately raced back to those troubled days of my childhood as I thought about the psychologist my parents had taken me to see ... I could remember the smell of his office, the room I took the tests in, my smart-alecky answers to his questions. When my new doctor asked me if I would be willing to take the tests again as an adult, I felt very much like I did as a child ... tense, apprehensive, fearful of failure. I finally agreed, and was pleasantly surprised to find out that I scored a bit higher on the tests the second time around. Hopefully, that means that I've learned a thing or two on my journey over the last 50 plus years.

Since I now have paperwork that says I'm smarter than the average bear, it puzzles me greatly as to how my thinking can slip so quickly from a rational cognitive state into one of paranoia and irrationality. Case in point ... my basement adventure of a couple of weeks ago, remember? Yep, the one that had me convinced that the house was going to cave in or explode and kill my dogs while I was at work because of a leaky wall and cracks in the concrete floor. Which, I've been assured by three different contractors by the way, will not happen. And said leak is hopefully going to be taken care of by the regrading of a small section of my front yard and some new guttering. But back to my puzzlement over how rapidly I made the descent into irrationality concerning my house issues ... I've lived in this house for over 10 years, and my basement has leaked for a while. Never before did I cross from being a sane woman to an insane one ... in fact, I have always tended to fall on the other side of home and auto repair ... if you ignore a problem long enough, it will go away on its own. And yet, I'm willing to admit that I became totally irrational a couple of weeks ago concerning my house ... I mean, come on, friends ... I was out in my garage in the middle of the night looking at cracks and wondering if I should park my car on the driveway. In anyone's book, that's not what's called rational behavior.

So in the wee hours of this morning when I woke up thinking about the number comments that have been left on my last six blog posts, my thoughts once again quickly descended into the realm of irrationality. From thinking that the numbers are some sort of coded message to me to wondering if they are the winning lottery numbers to contemplating if they are Bible references to being certain that they signify the day and time that I'm going to die ... well, you get it ... my thinking about the numbers has covered a huge gamut of completely irrational thinking. I even managed to lure one of my co-workers into my whole conspiracy theorizing today and she was Googling the numbers to try to find out what they mean. And even after the Web guru in our office told me that it was probably a bot-generated commenting process, I remain convinced tonight that I need to hire a private detective to discover the meaning behind the random numbers. Or ... or ... or ... Monk from TV ... he could surely get to the bottom of the mystery and put my mind at ease.

I read something this morning about being irrational, and I've been thinking about it all day. "The person indulging in the irrational thinking does not have a clue as to why he or she is behaving or thinking in this way. In fact, they do not think of their thinking as irrational at all even though they cannot explain the logical rationale for their behavior." I've said recently to friends that I can't explain or understand some of the illogical and irrational thinking or behavior that washes over me from time to time now ... like when I break out in a cold sweat and my heart almost beats out of my chest when I even think about going to the doctor and I tell myself that the fear I have is perfectly normal. Or when I creep around my basement in the middle of the night touching the walls to see if they are bowing or crumbling. Or when I actually consider calling in a super sleuth to tell me what a bunch of random numbers mean. But ... but ... but ... in my own defense, the second part of that quote doesn't apply to me at all ... I know and willingly recognize that my thinking is irrational. Therefore, I think that means that I'm not as irrational as I think I am. Rationally speaking, of course, friends ... rationally speaking.