Weebles wobble but they don't fall down.
Remember Weeble Wobbles? I used to love mine. I had a whole little nuclear family of them: Daddy, Mommy, a boy weeble, a girl weeble. Like many toys from my childhood, they are long gone. But I remember them fondly.
As an adult, I've really appreciated the image that a Weeble represented to me. It was like the Timex of toys! It could "take a licking but keeping ticking (wobbling)," because they couldn't be knocked down. You could batter and stomp and mistreat a Weeble in all manner of ways, but it would not be knocked down. It always bobbed right back upright. As I recall, they were so thickly coated, you could hardly scratch one either. They were practically indestructible. To me, as a Rational, Thinking Adult, this was a great allegory for how I wanted to be: the tree that sways in the wind. The coffee that gets better under heat and pressure and drowning. The Weeble that doesn't fall down.I bet you could shatter a Weeble if you dropped it far enough, though. Or smashed it with a hammer.So much for Weebles being a positive metaphor for my inner strength.I lay awake at night, listening to my heartbeat. It's irregular, like most everything else about me. Sometimes it worries me, the way my heart pounds and lurches. What drives it so? What makes my blood rush so strenuously around my body like it's being chased? No matter how placidly I place myself between the sheets, my heart is a rebel. It will not rest.Of course, my brain conspires (or should I say is inspired by) all that mucking about and flailing my heart does, and it wants a piece of that frantic action. So they start a concert together, and then I'm up and awake and there's no ignoring the two of those organs in cohoots.In the movie, "A Feast of Love," Greg Kinnear's character, who's been badly treated by love and is in despair, cuts one of his fingers intentionally. Later, when the emergency room doctor asks him why he did it, he says "Because I wanted the pain in my body to match the pain in my heart." Personally, I understand that sentiment in a deep and significant way. Because my heart and brain conspire together to share an unsustainable pace. It's as if my own insides have turned against me and are driving me in an ever accelerating pace, right off the edge of the proverbial cliff: high and precipitous. High enough to shatter a Weeble.And I can't think of a way to silence and still one without stilling them both. That's a lot more extreme than cutting one's finger. I need to find a Plan B.