The Bathroom Mirror Mandate

Yesterday I tweeted something my mother once told me which was:

“Who would have thought that a girl as odd as you would turn out quite so well.”

Someone retweeted it and asked me what made me so odd.  Clearly, that response cannot be completed in 140 characters.  So I thought I would share the answer here.

Why would I be willing to share such negativity about myself, you might ask?

1.  I already wrote a whole book about it so the cat is out of the bag.

2.  I am not embarrassed by it because I am at home with my humanity.

3. I want people to know that people like me who are public figures are just as failed and flawed and weird and quirky as everybody else. We are all in the oddball box together at one time or another.

Here’s what I wrote about myself in the book:

I talk too much and I talk too fast and if I am talking to someone who I think talks too slowly I finish their sentences for them.  I tend to look for the worst in everything and the best in everybody. I bore quickly and spook even faster. I have been known to get distracted by my own thoughts.  I engage in worry as an art form and the most mundane things unnerve me.  Details can walk eight past me and I will never even se them. I have no domestic abilities despite my ongoing deliberate attempts to acquire them.  I am a control freak and and I tend to suffer from all of the fears and power absorption that this trait often inspires.

The thing is I know all of these things about myself and never use them as excuses.  I keep these monsters well in my sights whenever I enter into a situation that might implicate the, because I now the first battle in any war I fight is always going to be with me.

My Mother’s Rules,  page 19.