spunoW: A Life Lesson

Standing in line at the grocery store, I noticed a new, dark chocolate candy bar with an unusual name: spunoW. I pondered the various ways to pronounce the new product name and wondered what the tie-in was to the chocolate bar, thinking perhaps it was a new energy bar. Curious, I picked up the bar and looked at it closer, especially the ingredients list, and when I put the bar back down in its niche, I was astounded to see that it was a ...

Mounds bar.

In my past, there was a horrific two years of my life when a person I thought was a friend became an enemy, an enemy dedicated to destroying both my career and my personal life. Her favorite saying was, "My perception is my reality," and that absurdity popped into my mind when I read "spunoW."

Yeah, my perception was my reality, but no one else shared my reality as I was looking at the product upside down and backward! Where anyone else would see "Mounds," I was clearly seeing "spunoW," and although that was my perception and my reality, it was not a reality shared by anyone else.

This was a point I desperately tried to make during the horror that was my life during those two years. She certainly had a right to both her perception and her reality, but she crossed the line when she made her perception and reality MY perception and reality, and then poisoned all the people with whom we both had contact with her perception and her reality. It was a losing battle, a battle I suddenly had no choice but to abandon, and a time in my life that changed me and the rest of my life forever.

I lost my faith, my friends , and myself during that time, a loss that grieves me to this day, but I'm better for that past as it pushed me to become who I am today. I moved on, and she stayed. Today, I recalled that blackness in a flash, but this is the first time I have actually laughed in conjunction with that part of my past. Must be true that time--and a chance encounter with a candy bar--can heal all wounds.