At first, I just heard a few innocent little rustlings. Something creaking in the wall. "Just the wind," I told myself. A sound in the kitchen while I was watching TV. "The cat must be climbing around somewhere," I thought.
No big deal. Just some background noise. So infrequent I might have been imagining it.
As time went by, the rustling escalated to scampering. That was a little harder to ignore. Infrequent, but impossible to chalk up to mere imagination. "Maybe there's a bird's nest in the eaves," I smiled, imagining little chirping mouths receiving food from their parents.
When my cat started camping out for hours in the kitchen, staring underneath the counter, a light bulb should have gone on, but it didn't. "I bet some of those cute little gecko's (lizards) have gotten in," I mused. "Hope she doesn't catch them."
But when I walked into the kitchen and saw a mouse eating out of the cat food bowl the truth was staring me in the face. My denial went down the drain. I had a mouse in my house!
I did what any confident, powerful, fearless woman would do. I ran screaming from the house calling for my husband. Since he was out of town at the time, he didn't come rushing to my rescue. (Smile)
Wishing I hadn't ignored those little warnings, I berated myself for a while, kicking
myself for not listening to my instincts, and wondering what the heck I was going to do. My feelings quickly escalated to panic. How could I stay in a house with a mouse?
"So," I debated. "Hotel? Stay with a friend? Bomb the kitchen?" After tossing around these improbable solutions, I sucked up my courage and went back inside.
I started to go about my business, avoiding the kitchen like the plague. Fortunately, my husband Chuck replied to my urgent messages on layover between flights and we came up with a plan (that included an urgent call to an exterminator right then).
With the truth about the mouse in the house out in the open, and a plan in place, I started thinking about what had happened. About how natural it is for us as human beings to know that something isn't right and go right on pretending everything is fine. We all do it. When we do this long enough, quite often the world steps in and says, "Hello. Here's the reality." And you end up facing what you were trying to avoid all along.
What's rustling or scampering around in your life? How much energy are you spending pretending nothing's up? Where are you stuck?
Sometimes telling yourself the truth about the worst case scenario shifts your perspective, and creates the space for change instead of denial.
