A friend and I were talking last night about her boss. She described a very nice lady who seems to be so put together yet her life was anything but normal. She suffers from a debilitating illness that her doctors can't seem to get a handle on so she continues to have seizures and blackouts. On top of that, she's getting tested this week for breast cancer and Alzheimer's....yeah, both! And just to add a little more fuel to her fire, her husband is bipolar and refuses to take his meds AND they are being bled dry by his in-laws. Any one of those things by it's self is horrible, but somehow this lady to holding it all together with all of them. My friend is being sucked in because she cares about this lady and let's face it, who could watch that train wreck and not want to help? So even though there's not much she can do about any of these issues, my friend has become a sounding board for her boss and tries to offer assistance in anyway she can. It's pretty draining but the need is there so she's in it for the long haul.
Thinking about how her coworker's saga is affecting my friend, I began to reflect upon my own life. It dawns on me that our lives resemble a big ol' pot of beef stew. In the beginning, the pot is filled with onions, carrots, beef and potatoes. We add garlic and herbs, broth and seasonings, but at first it's just a pot filled with cut-up veggies. It takes a while but eventually they begin to softly and little pieces start to break off and mingle with the other ingredients. Soon the broth thickens and what was once a container of ingredients because a hearty meal, filled with flavor and aroma. That's what our lives become...just a pot of intertwined, co-mingling family members, friends and coworkers. It sounds so inviting and it can be...it should be. But when one ingredient gets added to the mix that doesn't belong, it flavors the whole pot of stew too. So if a jar of baking soda finds it's way into the pot instead of corn starch, it won't thicken the broth but it sure will flavor it...badly. It will coat and cover every speck of that meal and there won't be any way to salvage it from the garage disposal.
That's what happened to my life. I let my brother and sister's addictions (aka baking soda) coat and cover every aspect of my life. They introduced the bad ingredient into the stew, but I stirred the pot. I'm the one that let it consume the flavor out of all my ingredients. I'm the one that kept sneaking ladles full of this crappy mixture into the garage disposal...never bothering to taste it first. I'm the one who assumed no one would possibly want it. I'm the one who decided it wasn't worth trying to save.
Strangely, it occurs to me now that if someone took a scoop of that stew and sent it off to a lab for analysis, the lab tech would put it through a battery of tests and would eventually come back with a list of ingredients found in the concoction. He wouldn't stop at baking soda. The tech would dig deeper and analyze everything. The list would include the carrots and the potatoes and even the onions. He could break down the seasonings, dividing the garlic from the salt and pepper. Because no matter how blended and broken down the ingredients might appear to the naked eye, their essence wouldn't disappear under the scrutiny of testing.
Somehow in all the years of struggling with my brother and sister's bad choices, I let their stories influence mine...so much that their stories became mine. I actually coated myself in their "baking soda" and rolled around in it until every piece of me was completely covered with it. My opinion of my life became a baking soda stew. I stopped at the surface and didn't try to discover what was underneath and I assumed no one else would want to either. And even worse that that, I allowed their baking soda stew to become my stew. I didn't put baking soda in my stew...and my stew doesn't have baking soda in it! But their's does and since we're family, I assumed that my stew was just like theirs. But it's not. I didn't grab a ladle of their tainted stew and dump it into mine. Their pot of stew is destined for the garage disposal, not mine. My stew isn't even made with the same ingredients and it certainly doesn't have baking soda in it. For some crazy reason, I assumed that since all our stews came from the same kitchen, they must all be tarnished but my stew is still edible. In fact, mine's not even beef stew...it's chili. But for years I've avoiding having my chili sampled by telling myself that it wasn't worth trying because it was flavored by my brother and sister's "baking soda".
I've always proudly proclaimed that I learned from other people's mistakes but in this case, I didn't learn from their mistakes, I lived them. I looked like a delicious pot of chili on the outside but I was trying to hide their secret by blending it in with my ingredients.
That's what we do in life, we take on other people's problem and let them affect our lives. Sometimes it's a good thing. If we have a loved one with cancer, we become invested in funding research to stamp it out. But we can also take their problems or bad choices and lose ourselves in the dark shadows they cast over us. It's a mistake so easily made. But we have to remember, no one thing hides anything else in our stew. All the ingredients are still there. We just have to find them and don't let their flavor get lost in the mix.
Don't ever take someone else's story...write your own. Or if you're like me, re-write it. Nobody can live your life better than you but they sure can influence it....only take the best parts and leave the rest for the garage disposal.
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