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I
am now completely convinced that as humans, we are blameless in this
world. For the longest time I have been reading things in the newspaper
like, "she weighed five hundred pounds, but it wasn't her
fault......" or "he was unable to leave his house for sixteen
years, but it wasn't his fault....." and this always irritates me.
Because, quite frankly, I am of the mind that it usually IS that
person's fault- at least. it mainly is. Believe me, I'd love nothing
more than to start my day with a case of Cokes and a big ole chocolate
chip cookie, but instead, I eat my almonds and an orange. I
think it would be fairly easy, given my penchant for sweets, to burgeon
into the pup-tent sizes of clothing. However, I made a conscious choice
at one point of my life that I was going to make some hard changes that
would benefit my well-being. And sometimes the LAST thing in life I want
to do is to go to the school to volunteer, or go to choir practice, or
do another children's play..... but I feel compelled to honor my
commitments and so I do it. I think I realized that this "I am not
to blame" syndrome had reached a crisis point when I turned on last
week's Oprah. I
was in the kitchen, making supper when I turned on the television to
divert me from the dastardly task of cooking. It was there that I came
face to face with one of the most gruesome subjects the great Oprah has
ever tackled. HOARDING SYNDROME. For those of you who tuned in; you know
what I am talking about. A
lovely older woman, who looked to all the world like Mary Tyler Moore,
apparently was a "victim" of this "Hoarding
Syndrome". What it amounted to, as far as I could gather between
chopping peppers and onions, was that she was MENTALLY and PHYSICALLY
incapable of throwing anything away. EVER. So the horrific accumulation
of this "disease" was that her house was a sty. Now
I know that I have called myself filthy from time to time, and it is no
secret that cleaning is NOT my favorite activity. However, compared to
this woman, my house is a shrine of cleanliness. She had rooms that were
impassable for the junk, and most gruesome of all, she let the pets let
it rip wherever they wished. AND SHE DIDN'T CLEAN UP AFTER THEM. This
I did not get. Even if I was going to buy into the "victim of the
Hoarders Syndrome" story, which I was not, why in God's name would
she not clean up after the pets? Did she also like to hoard poop piles?
Apparently, because that is exactly the situation in that house. She
also had an aversion to washing dirty dishes. She like a nice giant
collection of dirty dishes as well as the poop collection. Oprah
said it was sad and I guess if I were more compassionate, I would think
so too. Instead, it just made me kind of angry. What the woman really
needed was some kind of "housewife boot camp" where she was
screamed at by some kind of sergeant of cleanliness until she learned
how to put her dogs outside when they had to go to the bathroom. Or,
imagine this, load the dirty dishes into the dishwasher when they were
done being used. I think that by calling her a "victim" of
"Hoarder's Syndrome", she was being given the green light to
go ahead with such disgusting behavior and of course, as always,
"it wasn't her fault." I
am probably being unnecessarily harsh on the woman, because, after all,
she did come onto national television and admit on air that she was
unable to clean up after herself even remotely. However, by stating that
she had a "syndrome", she admitted that she was reluctant to
change, and that probably she might not ever be a functioning,
poop-cleaning up human being. Sheesh. It
seems that every where I turn these days, victims abound. Everyone is a
victim of some sort (aren't we all?) but we are supposed to turn our
heads, suck it up and do their share of the work because, oh my gosh,
they really can't help it. That last box of Twinkies just flew into
their mouths as if by magic and well, who can expect a person to do
dishes when they have a SYNDROME? Of course, no one has to take my words
seriously, because I have often been accused of being a very bitter
person. You see, this bitterness has been with me since adolescence (ask
my mother) and renders me incapable of seeing the world with a fresh and
unjaded eye. I
am just a victim, really, of my own brutal mindset, and I think that
this syndrome, I'll call it Bitter Girl Syndrome (BGS for short) is
making it very difficult for me to see the world clearly. It really
isn't my fault.
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