Fuzzy Cuzzies

My favorite family members are on the Irish side of my family tree. They have always quietly been in the background as my guardians and guidance. I can hear them with ease, with a whisper, with authority, with a laugh. Many times they have been the only ones I can hear. 

While I live in this sober living circle, this mental health specialty facility, I make time for things I wouldn't normally do. I love to read and write but didn't have the focus to do so in the other place.

I am allergic to mushrooms. Highly allergic. 

They grow in the dark, in fecal matter, and they taste exactly so. I've tried every kind of mushroom out there. I try everything at least once. The Portobello Mushroom, they claimed, tasted like steak.  

No. Buzzer sound.

The Portobello mushroom tasted like feces and dirt, just like every other mushroom I have ever tried. The real reason I am allergic to mushrooms is because they are a fungus. 

I've read a lot about trees and plants as I am an excellent gardener and can grow just about anything. Fungus, I've learned, needs to be kept to a minimum. We need it for the soil and the worms in the soil and the literal circle of life. If any fungus begins to overgrow it becomes a mushroom or worse, it overgrows the good in the soil and causes infections. 

Fungus will never taste like steak no matter how many different kinds you grow. I do not believe mushrooms are healthy or even edible. I would go as far to say I hate mushrooms, but then I would nullify my point. 

I dislike mushrooms so because they are a fungus and fungus is an infection. Something that grows in the dark. Something that cannot and should not be present in one's heart. I was growing a fungus in my heart. I was infected. I was infected with a small amount of fungus in my body, in my soul, and it overtook my brain. It was a mushroom cloud of hate. 

'Hostility', said my brainiac cuzzo, 'will get you no where.' 

It made me think again. 

It made me sit down and read. I have my mental health books, my 'practical wisdom from martial arts' book. It reminded me not to focus in the survival mode, the fungus. It actually made me smile. 

I thought of the scene from Pretty Woman when Richard Gere says, 'I am very angry with my father.' 

Agreed Richard Gere, agreed. 

I also thought about why I really started this blog. It takes me back to my roots. It makes me nostalgic and happy to share things. But I started this blog for help. For help with mental health, at my roots, at my soil. 

I am a professional secret keeper above all else. I would never dare tell the secrets of another. It's how I made so much money behind the bar. 

This helps me tell my own secrets. The ones I kept in the dark, growing disgusting mushrooms. 

In my dialectical* behavioral training they say, 'If our emotions feel unheard they only get bigger.'

Maybe I am unheard because of the way I was saying it. Screaming at the top of my lungs. Threatening to light people on fire or give them a smiley face necktie. 

I may never like my immediate family, but I am stuck with them. They are my fungus. I need them to survive. More importantly, they've got my son, and I need him to thrive. 

I will continue to do the work. The hard work. And maybe, just maybe, I won't think of them as a fungus in the end. 

This is called hope. Pandora has as does Andy DuFrane. And they found success, eventually.   

I'm repeating myself here but it's something that's important to me.

*dialectic means to balance and compare two things that appear very different or even contradictory. In dialectical behavior therapy the balance is between change and acceptance.  

I have always believed life is a paradox. A paradoxical paradise, but there's plenty of time for me to ramble about that.