A mainstay in need of re-homing
Growing up (guess I’ll be doing that forever), I had an absolutely ear-catching behavior. I happily used it to garner attention from others. Ms. Sarcasm, incarnate. And, oh wow, was I good! And funny. But, so sarcastic…
I find myself, literally, squirming at these memories. I had a prodigious capacity for witty sarcasm and loved the attention it garnered. “Wow, I just got off a good one!”
I tell you, the things we, sometimes, frail humans do to capture the attention of others. My gift of witty sarcasm did the trick. Cutting words were a specialty, given that sarcasm is the equivalent of waving “I’m here, I’m here!” Any embarrassment, or pain afforded those who were the butt of my barbed (but very funny) comments, was irrelevant. I had my spotlight. That was sufficient….until it wasn’t.
“Who am I, really?” kept floating up, whispering behind all my highly charged and attention-getting words. That damn question would not go away. Would-not-go-away. It began to dawn on me that my attention-seeking (and very funny) sarcasm was, perhaps, not the “me” I wanted to share with the world. A budding social worker, at that. C’mon.
Panic!
Could I continue garnering others’ attention, bereft of my mainstay, sarcasm? Sarcasm was my longtime, reliable, flag waving, “Jan’s here! And she’s funny!” path to capturing ears and eyeballs…..
….but it was a modus operandi no longer in lockstep with my chosen values.
(Don’t you just hate it when this happens?)
Oh, I tell you, this adult schtick! Learning to harness my reflexive snarkiness? I loved my creative sarcasm and the attention it garnered from folks. Sad, but true, I gloried in my funny and cutting puns. OMG, you should’ve seen all the sarcasm comments in my high school yearbook.…
Yet, I was hurting and embarrassing people. My chosen highs were sarcasm-induced. Thinking back to this stage in my life makes curling into a fetal ball very attractive.
I needed a reset. Of my values. And I received it. From a college philosophy class? I can’t really recall. Does it matter? I just remember beginning to constantly scribble, again and again, in all my notebooks:
“Words Create Worlds”
~ Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel
“Words create worlds” became my meme (although the term “meme” hadn’t even reached the light of creation at that juncture.) It was almost hypnotic how I found myself, mindlessly, penning the quote in margins of all my class notebooks. (Ah, yes, those pre-digital days of yore.)
I got it. Somehow. My biting (and funny) sarcasm was toxic. This wasn’t the world I wanted to create and live in. Of course, being the imperfect human that I am (kind of like you, I’m betting), I occasionally still hear a light stream of sarcasm trickling through my mind, even today, but it usually stays there. Well, mostly….