Being Proud Of Your Spots

It was a chiropractor in a town 110 kms away that gave my childhood a much needed shot of positivity. He adjusted my pelvis and almost instantly I stopped wetting the bed. My parents had employed all sorts of techniques to eliminate this humbling ailment. Embarrassing for me but downright annoying for Mum. Laundry. Airing out mattresses. It was like I had been to a healer. A witch doctor. Some guru who had touched me with the hand of God. Perhaps the change correlated with my age and I simply grew out of it but for some reason I remember the country chiro’s Midas touch.

When I was little it was no big deal. I became familiar with waking in the morning or during the night wet through. Awkward and uncomfortable I would quite often get ahead of Mum’s duty and strip the bed, wrap a towel around me and return to sleep. It never happened a second time. An amazing technical advancement then made its way to my sleeping vessel that everyone thought would do the trick. It was a mattress protector with sensors that once it felt any sense of moisture would activate a bell like one you would see and hear ring violently at the end of a school hall in an American college movie. It simply woke everyone else up. Not me. I just kept pissing.

It became my little secret. My visible birthmark. My badge of dishonor. As I grew older and bravely started to attend sleep overs it became an advertised preamble. I couldn’t just hose all over my friend’s sheets unannounced. I also had to explain it to visitors when they stayed in case the engulfing fume of urine and a disorientated string bean walking around the room in the middle of the night with an arm full of cotton was too confronting for them. I remember feeling quite comfortable toward the end of my bed wetting reign. Parents of friends were so lovely about it. On the rare occasion I got through ‘dry’ for a night they joined my euphoria the next day and wallowed in my triumph. Moreover, they were there to assure me when I apologized for doing what I pretty much suggested I was going to do.

This reflection reminds me of how important it is to beware of your shortcomings and be comfortable with them. Speaking out to the universe will only help you become more peaceful with it. Potentially it may make others feel more comfortable about their own inefficiencies even if they aren’t prepared to share. My wife didn’t share that peace when I must have had a relapse in my 20’s and 30’s on the intoxicated occasion I didn’t make the toilet. By then I had advanced to kneeling in the corner of the bedroom, straight into the laundry, once on my son's Apple Mac and 18 years earlier filling up his baby highchair tray. Who could forget Spud’s shocking moment in the film Trainspotting when he appears in the kitchen during a ‘walk of shame’ and wrestled with his new friend’s mum for the sheets until they were pulled taught, and machine gunned the entire kitchen with you know what!?

Normalizing the abnormal is brave and heroic. It strengthens your resolve. It smashes self-pity out of the park. It takes you away from a victim mentality. Do you ever feel an innate guilt when watching a terminally ill child ‘get on’ with life? A person insanely disfigured say they’re the luckiest person on earth? Our challenge as people, parents and human beings is to remind the generations coming through that we are just that, human ‘beings’. It is more important to ‘be’ than to ‘look’ or even act a certain way. Social media doesn’t help with the ego. The self-esteem. In a positive way people in minority groups have been given a stage or arena to dance and perform to their own belief. Some decorum and diplomacy wouldn’t go astray from some corners of the community when wearing their hearts on their sleeves.

My mind mentor shared a great quote the other day that “My shortcomings do not define me. They drive me”. We can get stuck in neutral when we assess and focus too closely on our deficiencies, what we aren’t good at. Throwing in the towel. Conceding to what you think you can’t achieve can rubber stamp your failure way too quick. The drive therefore becomes your intent to make your way slowly to achieving or negating that shortcoming or in some situations turning up the heat on your traits, skills and attributes that are exemplary. It was a very simple query from a work colleague recently about an important banking process within our business that helped me in a similar vein. When she posed the question that inner anxiety of “I don’t know this sort of shit. It is not my forte. I have always sucked at it” kicked in instantly. But after some careful and quiet assessment I flipped the script on what she was suggesting and solved the issue within minutes. I made a journal note about how good it felt to put my big boy pants on and have conviction over a shortcoming and bring belief to my ability.

Former US president Theodore Roosevelt is attributed with the quote “Comparison is the thief of joy”. As soon as we dive down the rabbit hole of worrying about what others have compared to us, we are robbing ourselves of the beauty that is within and more often than not directly in front of us. I am working on a podcast with my daughter which is exciting but a little nerve wracking also. I am popping bubbles in my head that after 17 years of radio nobody wants to hear from me again. That notion is merely an excuse for me to stay safe in the harbor. I wasn’t built for that. Time to set sail regardless of the weather.