The Fraudlings

Today I am feuding with the Fraudlings: Tiny rowdy beings that, whenever I feel bold, snarl at me "Who do you think you're fooling?"

They get loud when I start getting industrious, autonomous, visionary, sure-spoken. They call out names like "faker," "poser-girl," "dull, broken, unworthy hoaxster."  I hear them all around: from bookshelves and dusty corners, kitchen cupboards and along the garden path. I work tight and breathless to block out their heckling, but they are always waiting for me to let go. They can wear me down until I relent and escape.

They stay so pleasantly quiet when I sit passively, watching and mindless. Those are fitting activities for me, they think. They celebrate when my brain is idling and my body is still. They get high on the guilt-fumes that rise from the wasting of life.

They used to live in my cerebral cortex, right in there. They had a trailer park set up, had it easy for years. They could watch my sparkly intentions flash round my synapses like lightning bugs on a summer night and they'd bat the spark right out of them without even setting down their beers. On occasion, a big idea would flush and surprise them - threaten to poop on their party- but those vicious little rednecks could always shoot it down before it got much air.

I finally sniffed them out and started poking at their encampment, prodding into their little trailers and squinting to read their tiny tattoos and saying, "I don't think y'all belong in here anymore. I want to use this patch for something else... Something newer, or older, I haven't decided yet.  Definitely something fresher."

The Fraudlings did their normal demotivational hollering. I stared them down, and started plotting against them.

I pestered them with new rules. I posted signs that I knocked into the gray matter with my fist:

"intoxicants and firearms prohibited"

"quiet hours strictly enforced"

"no dumping"

"no haters"

I noticed how much easier it was to sink something in there than in the packed clay of my garden. The place is fertile ground, litter-strewn and unplanted ever since the Fraudlings squatted there.

Then I interrogated them:

"How did you get in here?"

"Why are you so loud?"

"Why are you so down on me?"

I never got a straight answer...

The scrutiny was too intense for them, though. They packed up, marched down my ear canals, spitting, moaning and threatening as they left, then out and bouncing off my shoulders in all directions. The weedy bastards seemed smaller on the outside. I got to work, cleaned up the mess they'd left.

They are still living in my house and occasionally climb in my pockets. They leap from me like fleas that whisper and sneer from other people's shoulders. They cling there and say "one slip and she'll see who you really are," or "you'll never be as free and together as this guy." This used to make me cower, but I'm getting better at ignoring them.

Days like today, when I am searching for an outlet for my voice, they have a sporting holiday - they hurl grappling hooks at my ears and try to swing in as they yodel "Who, You?" I foil their invasions, shake them off, one day at a time.

As long as I fight, I have space to cultivate my will, to plant seeds of intentions, to stake up my seedlings so they can take off, gain their own energy and make a tall stand of my work so full that the fresh hushing of wind in the branches will diffuse the sharp edges of distant war-cries, making them directionless and dull, as they should be.

© Laura Seale, 2015

Dr. Squintum's Exaltation or the Reformation, 1763
from Wikimedia Commons