Little Birdie

I’m not doing the right thing with my hands.

Instead of using them to express beauty, or as an expression of it, I ravage them.

It’s a compulsion, a habit, an outlet for stress relief or boredom, whatever. It’s grown steadily worse the older I get. I remember age 4 or 5, still sucking my thumb, and my dentist tried to use a reward/punishment system to get me to stop. I was supposed to put a frowny face on the calendar if I sucked my thumb that day, and a smiley if I didn’t. Mom didn’t like that system so we did something other than a frowny face…I think. I don’t remember too clearly, but I do remember not getting very many rewards.

I must have switched thumb sucking for nail biting. I tried nasty fingernail polish, gloves, regular fingernail polish–EVERYTHING on the market to try and stop biting my nails. My uncle even tried to pay me to quit biting them.

Eventually I moved on to the skin around the nail. Gross. I won’t go into any more detail.

God is about to change all that. Another layer of the onion is about to get peeled off. Ouch.

I can’t wait

I suspect it’s got something to do with my music. Probably the piano. What a thorn in my side. What a beautiful instrument. What I wouldn’t give to be as free in the piano as I am with my voice, or the drum.

Part of it is unskillfulness. Skill comes with practice. I can already transpose like a fiend. I’ve got the scales down pat. Piano theory is no problem. But as much as I love it, I just can’t get comfortable playing it. Too much emotional garbage.

If the two are really connected, it’ll be awesome to see what God does. But whatever the reason for this compulsive habit, I’m really sick of doing it and I can’t wait to get free. Come Lord Jesus.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 14th, 2007 at 3:14 am and is filed under my life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.