When I was a little girl, I used to say goodnight to all my dolls before I nodded off to sleep. I called each doll by name individually, an easy task because I didn’t have many dolls.
But then The Great Summer of Paper Doll Making occurred, and I added hundreds of homemade paper dolls to my collection. Most of the paper dolls were small enough to dance on the head of a thumbtack, but they all had very big personalities. It took me hours each night to bid them sweet dreams, which left me hollow-eyed with exhaustion the next day. I still had enough energy to make more paper dolls constantly, which added to the problem. Finally my obsessive insomnia attracted the attention of my parents, who staged an intervention: they confiscated my scissors and told me to go to sleep like a good little girl. Even at that early age I’d figured out that bad little girls have more fun than good little girls, so as soon as my parents left the room, I returned to my other clandestine nighttime activity of reading books under the covers with a flashlight.
Now my dolls are props I use for paintings, not personal friends like my childhood dolls, so before going to bed I don’t say goodnight to my dolls. Instead I bid adieu to my personal demons, thus insuring that they won’t wake me up all night. Some of these personal demons are spawned from memories of long-ago misbehaviors of mine. Those ancient personal demons are veritable dinosaurs in the canon of my earthly sins, but they’re still as lethal as the day they were born.
According to my self-help books, the best way to banish personal demons is to write them down on a scrap of paper, put them in an envelope, then pull them out at random and write about how they’ve ruined my life. This exercise is supposed to release me from their power.
Every time I release one of my personal demons, a couple more pop up. Now I have more scraps of paper with personal demons than I ever had paper dolls. The envelopes full of them are multiplying, and the stacks of notebooks full of releasing exercises soar all the way up to the ceiling. It takes me hours…sometimes all night… to get all my personal demons squared away.
I’m so utterly, completely exhausted…I might have to stop writing down personal demons and just go to sleep like a good little girl. But based on a review of my personal demons, I am definitely not a good little girl.
I guess I’ll go read some books under the covers with a flashlight…as long as they’re not self-help books, that is.