Dysfunction and Assimilation

By Nicole Marie Hilton, a certain date to Monday, August 29th, 2022

I’m writing this at the outside table, surrounded by two of my brothers and their families, as well as my parents. The most stimulating comments range from, “which cow are we eating?” to, “please pass the salad,” and everyone is sweeping sweeping sweeping everything that actually needs to be said under the rug—and burying it deep down in the earth like the weapons of the righteous Lamanites—but unlike the Lamanites it’s not a good thing.

I wish…I wish things could be different. I almost just said those things out loud, but I’m not going to in order to “keep the peace,” even though none of our hearts are peaceful and these little ones I’m surrounded by are learning how to be warped instead of warriors, dysfunctional instead of dynamic.

I vow to, no matter how painful it is, to stare my own dysfunction in the face when I have my family and right now—even if that means I have to delete this post after whoever-you-are reads it.

Any chance of my parents or family reading this? I don’t think so… I’m just the local cuckoo, a funny, yet endearing, annoyance at best.

Monday, August 29th, 2022

This writing is now hilarious to me, because I now realize that I was the most dysfunctional one at the table. And If I had allowed myself to enjoy the others and let my true self glow, the entire evening would have been transformed.

But there’s absolutely no blame, here on my part, for myself. I’ve grown since I wrote this so much–it seems that I had been allowing a very judgmental part of me–a shard of personality–to be fronting for an entire year. And she’s now assimilated back into the Whole Nicole. So woot for that.