Weird Psychological Insights

Epiphany While Painting a Dresser

You find the oddest bits and pieces on your journey to self-discovery

Commitment Issues? Curiosity Killed the Cat

I always like the idea of studying medicine. The risk of killing the patient — not so much. As a kid, I enjoyed shows like Quincy, M.E. and as an adult, CSI and NCIS. The science is interesting and you can’t kill a person who is already dead. So “Coroner” or “Medical Examiner” might have worked as a career. That is, until I learned what people look and smell like when they’re dead and really ripe, or they’ve been in the water a while before their bodies are discovered.

Flash forward: I learned, while working for a well-known PC manufacturer, that part of my terror in opening the case of a PC was akin to the thought of being a surgeon and making that first incision. Once you’re in, you’re committed. The “patient” lives or dies; it’s on you. That’s fine, but that first incision implies a terrible responsibility. I could work on a PC if someone ELSE removed the case, though. I loved exploring the “guts” of the machine in a lab, where all the cases were tossed aside.

Until that epiphany, I’d have laughed in your face if you’d said I might have “commitment issues.” I can commit to people — but maybe too much, sometimes. I’m not going to open one up while it’s still breathing.

Today’s Project: Painting a Dresser

Another, related, epiphany. I have trouble doing “work on the house.” My husband, by now, could probably build a damned house out of scrap wood and recycled nails. Me? I’m afraid I’ll break the house, just doing touch-up paint.

I blame my mom, in part, for this. “Brush strokes,” to her, were like wire hangers to Joan Crawford. Consequently, I break out in a sweat just looking at a can of semi-gloss paint. I don’t do “handywork,” much to my husband’s dismay.

But today, I’m painting a dresser. I tried to get my husband to haul it out to the curb on “Heavy Trash Day,” but he balked. I know, now, it’s because we’d kill ourselves trying to get it down the stairs from the second floor. We could barely get it onto the drop-cloth together. I’d sell it on NextDoor, but it’s an ugly thing and I’d probably have to pay some strapping young men just to haul it away.

Clearly, I can’t kill the damned thing. I had this dresser when I was a teenager. It is a decent brand of furniture, but it is painted and antiqued and decorated with bamboo stencils. My daughter “inherited” it when she was a teen — I think she always hated it, and I’m not sure I blame her. I probably tried to pass it off as “shabby chic,” but she’s always had more fashion sense than I, and knew better.

Having accepted the fact that I cannot possibly make this thing any worse, and may save my husband’s and my life in the process of “rehabilitating” it, by allowing it to remain in the room, upstairs, that once belonged to my daughter, I am painting it.

I’m starting to think this thing has potential.