Doubt is Like a Creepy Uncle
How your mind can gaslight you with images from the past
My mother came from a big family. There were a lot of uncles around when I was young: her three brothers and the husbands of three of her sisters. My biological father was married to someone else and didn’t know I existed, so my uncles were the first paternal figures in my life.
There was one uncle who I thought was creepy. He always stood around at family gatherings, looking at me with this weird grin. His hair was slick and greasy, and he would take something out of his pocket to show me in this weird way that made me afraid of it. It was always some harmless thing.
I couldn’t understand why I was scared of him because the whole family seemed to accept him. I liked my cousin, and she lived with him every day. And he was married to my mom’s favorite sister. So he must be alright — everyone else seemed to think he was alright.
Still, I wanted to get away from him. But I couldn’t say anything. He was creepy, there was no doubt in my mind. Their house always smelled like cooking meat, and when we became vegetarians when I was eight, it added to the atmosphere of creepiness. He made weird comments about our eating habits. “What do you eat?” he would ask, as if beef was the only food group. “Don’t you want some meat? It’s good for you.”
Lately I’ve been engaged in a significant creative endeavor and noticed that doubt is like my creepy uncle. It shows up as fear about harmless things and makes me question my perception of reality. I know what I’m doing is interesting and good for me (just like vegetarianism). I trust my instincts most of the time. But there’s a voice in the back of my head saying, “no one else is doing this, so why should you? Why should you be any different from the rest of us?”
Listening to intuition
I suspect some dark things were going on in that double-wide trailer where my creepy uncle lived. There was always a barking beagle chained to a doghouse outside. The last time I visited, the carpet was worn to the floorboards, and not only did the trailer smell like cooking meat, it also smelled like birdshit from the cages that needed to be cleaned. The kitchen table was piled so high with papers and objects you couldn’t sit down to eat, and the sofa was draped with sheets to hide the cat scratches and protect it from the beagle when he was let inside. I did not want to — and there was no place to — sit down and listen to creepy things he had to say.
Looking at these pictures almost 50 years after they were taken, it occurs to me that most of my uncles were kind of creepy. My stepdad, whom my mother met when I was six, was as far from creepy as you could get. He was a hippy who convinced us to become vegetarians to save the planet — in 1980. Papa and I had headstand competitions in his yoga phase. We copied poses out of a book because there was no such thing as a local yoga class in Hot Springs Village, Arkansas. The uncles probably thought we were crazy, as we traveled all over the South every other winter in an RV while I did homeschool.
Trusting myself is an ongoing practice
Doubt is the voice of anything that convinces you not to do things outside the norm. I’ve been living outside the norm most of my life, and the world is finally catching up to where we were 40 years ago — yoga is now taught in corporate environments and event planners consider vegetarian options.
I’m going to keep doing the things I dream about — even if what I do is 40 years ahead of its time. I live 3,000 miles away from any of my uncles that are still alive, so why should they still live inside my head?
Papa’s still encouraging me to do whatever I want to do. He trusts me, so I think I will too.
