(Before I get to my post, I have to give a disclaimer.  As a contracted blogger with Beliefnet, I have no control over the ads they choose to surround my posts.  Please understand that I have no political agenda in this blog, so any political ads you see are not put here by me. )

So, I’ve had a couple of things happen in the last few days that got me to thinkin’…

The first was last week:  I was getting dressed for work and decided to wear socks because my shoes are too loose, so I pulled a pair of black socks out the drawer and put them on the bed. (I only have one pair of black socks since I hardly ever wear socks, so that will help give a little perspective).  I finished dressing and doing my makeup and reached for my socks and they weren’t there!

My first thought was that I hadn’t really pulled them out of the drawer–only thought about doing it.  Don’t know if you’ve ever experienced that particular phenomenon, but it’s unnerving…so, I check the drawer–no socks.

Next, I double-checked the bed, in case I just didn’t see them the first time because I was reasonably certain that I had put them there–no socks.

Checked the floor around the bed in case they had fallen down…checked the bathroom in case I had taken them in there and set them down…checked the drawer one more time, the bed one more time…the bathroom one more time…gave up and wore a different pair of shoes.

Now understand that the whole time I was doing this I was giving myself negative talk about how absent-minded I was for not remembering what had happened to my socks.  I spent at least 10 minutes looking for them and kicking myself.

After I got dressed I went downstairs to leave and (as you may have already guessed), there was my pair of socks, unrolled in the middle of the floor–one more victim of my 95-lb. sneak-attack dog, Lucy.

The next incident began early in the week and continue for several days:  Rick’s church was having a Coffee House event on Friday night.  Back in August, when we were in Prescott, I went into this candle shop I love and bought a bunch of special floating candles to be used in bowls on the tables. 

I’ve been on a huge reorganization, downsizing project for the past 3 or 4 months (I’ll write about that later), so I reorganized the bag with the candles in it and couldn’t find it anywhere.

I spent lots of time everyday looking for them and by Thursday still hadn’t found them.  Thursday, I had the day off, so determined that I was going to do an all out search for them until I found them.  You might wonder why I cared so much, but I spent a fair amount of $$ on them, plus I didn’t want to have to admit that I didn’t know where they were.

I went through boxes in my recently organized garage, shelves in my closet, my linen closet, my kitchen cabinets and all the storage boxes and drawers I have in various places in my house.  I actually searched the garage a couple of times, and climbed on a stool to check the top shelves of the linen closet, all to no avail.  I finally looked one more time on the top shelves of my kitchen cabinets…I don’t have a very big kitchen, but for some reason that kept resonating with me as the place I had stashed them.  Sure enough, there they were, in a bag, in a bowl (space saving again) on the very top shelf.

Such relief!

Then I had to go to a doctor’s appointment and when I got there, my blood pressure was elevated.  First I blamed it on the “white coat syndrome”, but then realized it was probably due to the stress I put myself under for two hours that morning looking for the candles and (yep–you guessed it), blaming myself for not being on top of where I had put them, telling myself that a lot of good all my recent organization had done if I couldn’t find a stupid bag full of important candle–basically bawling myslef out again.

Why do I do this?  I guess it’s in my DNA?  I work in a department where if an error is found, practically everyone in the department starts suspecting that she made the mistake.  (We do have one male in our department, and I don’t get the feeling that he participates in this self-blame all that much).

I’m willing to beat myself up mentally and sometimes verbally (yes, I do talk to myself out loud) before I ever discover what really happened.

In the case of the socks, I started my day with 10 minutes of negative self-talk about the socks and then another several minutes negative-talking myself about blaming myself for the missing socks when I should have suspected Lucy all along.  I can’t win either way.

As far as the candles go, I not only badmouthed myself for being so forgetful, I also tried to neutralize all the positive things I’ve accomplished in the last few months.

What a waste of time!  I’d like to blame it on Satan, but I think that’s a little too simplistic.

Why is it that the first thing I do when something isn’t going right is blame myself?  Do I actually expect perfection?

I am going to try to turn over a new leaf and not blame myself first when things don’t go well.  It’s going to be part of the new me–the organized, clear-thinking person living a simplified, focused life…

Or I can always blame the dog!