I Am Unique and I’m Not Going Back.

I might have mentioned that we are selling our house….

In a less than great housing market…..

We love a challenge.

And I have mixed emotions about this. Not about selling the house, that I am looking forward to. No it is the whole process of selling and all that you are expected to go through to get someone to buy the house that has me thinking.

I know, scary thought when Deb’s brain cells get to firing on all their miniscule neurons.

At any rate for a time the whole staging of the house and all that went with putting it on the market popped me right back into a time in my life that I just didn’t want to relive and worked so hard to get out of. That period of time when I was a follower and so insecure and always wondering what I should be doing to get others to like me.

I didn’t like me very much at that point in time.

This period of house on the market resurrects my years of what I think of as “performance anxiety on the stage of life” where I was always worried about
     1. what if they don’t like me
     2. am I wearing the “right” clothes?
     3. do I look fat in this?
     4. what do I have to do to be like everyone else?

I hated that period of my growing up years….and that period lasted until I was in my 30’s folks so it was a LONG period.

The real estate agents and the stagers come into your home and tell you that you must change everything. That you must put away everything that reflects your personality. That you must have a house that is totally neutral because people who are looking for houses don’t want to come in and see your pictures on the wall. That might be true in some cases.

And so you nod your head and you do exactly what they say. Because they say it with authority. It just doesn’t feel right but you do it.

But I just hate the scrubbing of all personality in order to have conformity with what is the lowest common denominator. For so long I had no individuality and no personality. Ask HHBL, he will tell you. I was a follower who didn’t know how to be herself. Someone who didn’t have the confidence to laugh at herself first before others did. Someone who could say, “I have gray hair and wrinkles and they tell a story so no you can’t erase them.”

But now, now I raise my fist in defiance. I have tomato plants in pots on the deck. GASP! And I am not going to remove the plants that have again migrated to the sunroom. GASP again! And I don’t really care if they think that I should move the books off my bedside table. I like them there. And there might be a few tchatchke that have made their way to the shelves in my office. So sue me.

This is my house. I live here. I have to be myself. And I am not going to be scrubbed into conformity by Donna and Joyce who aren’t the boss of me! Said very quietly and to myself.

I worked too hard to be a unique individual and I am not going back.