“Prepare to die, Satan claims you, Carrie.”
Living Happy Despite Everything
I go through most of my life feeling pretty lucky. I have a place to live. I have food. I'm not currently under constant threat of violence. That's all pretty sweet and it hasn't always been that way for me.
And part of the way that it's happened is that I just keep working and doing and going after things, but not in a despot way, but in an "everyone, let's make this world better together!" kind of way.
Part of determining what you're passionate about is asking yourself if you'd do what you're doing even if you made no money at all.
For me, being a writer, is just something I do. I can't imagine not doing it. And I feel lucky and blessed that I’ve been able to do it for a living and also help other people do it, too.
I like that so freaking much. Writing fiction, founding a local news site, is important to me.
Why?
I like it when I get to witness other people shine.
And it impacts me way too much when they suffer, or make mistakes, and this scam caller made such a horrible mistake that I thought I'd share it with you.
I get this phone call from "headquarters" about how I had "four complaints against me" and the "local cops" would come get me unless I called a specific number back in 24 hours.
And here's the thing—people in positions of power who are threatening you with jail time for 'four complaints,' don't call the local authorities, 'cops.' They call them police. Or law enforcement. But not 'cops.' Word choice matters. That's your writing lesson of the post.
But ...
The call made me think of the other interesting and randomly threatening phone calls that have happened in my life. I think my favorite ones are where I am threatened not by 'local cops,' but by the actual devil himself. Because honestly? If you're going to get threatened why not by the ultimate in evil, am I right?
Or just a devil duck?
So, anyway, those of you who are my friends on Facebook heard how I got this crank call on another Monday night a while ago.
That time, the caller said, “Prepare to die, Satan claims you, Carrie.”
And I was all, “Hm. Wait! Can you not hang up so quickly, creepy-voiced man, because I would like to try to discuss this and maybe argue Satan out of it!”
But he hung up.
Apparently, Satan does not like to argue with random children's book writers? Who knew?
And I was all, “Man, that was so creepy, it was kind of funny.”
This is pretty much my response to everything creepy. Floating apparition? I laugh. Possible UFO? I laugh. Weird man running away after ringing my doorbell? Hold on, while I giggle. It's sort of my defense mechanism for all bad things; I fight them with humor. It's either that or screaming and screaming hurts your throat if you do it for too long.
I have other defense mechanisms. These are called dogs.
So, for the whole night I was basically all, “Dogs. Come Velcro yourselves to my sides.” Gabby was alive then, which was awesome.
And then, because I had no attention span, I kind of forgot about the call from the devil because I was busy writing and living and writing more.
But two days later, I almost died.
Really.
I was driving to this cool conference of librarians in Maine and I was on the turnpike and wearing the ankle brace from hell. That point of origin is just like the devil, I guess, although originally he was from heaven.
The brace, which was on my left foot, suddenly flopped onto the brake. Now, basically the ankle brace from hell was so heavy and thick I could stand on a puppy and not notice. So, when the car lurched and lost 40 mph (like I was going 70 and then was going 30) JUST AS I WAS PASSING A LOGGING TRUCK (because—Maine), and the car's tires made this weird noise AND the car behind me wiggled all around to avoid the collision (Nice Driving, Mr. Car Driving Guy, btw), I realized that something was going on.
Fortunately, the brace was not on a poor little puppy.
Unfortunately, it was on my brake.
And I yelled, "Get thee behind me, Satan," because obviously all the Friday nights in first grade that the Albertson family brought me to Pioneer Girls at Calvary Baptist Church in New Hampshire had conditioned me more than I realized. They were trying so hard to save my first-grade self's soul. Apparently, Satan thought they failed.
Anyway, I moved the brace off the brake and kept driving and then got to Augusta (where the conference was) and totally cried. I mean, I sobbed.
Seriously. I was a total wuss because:
1. I did not want that crank caller to be right.
2. I did not want to die because of my stupid ankle brace from hell.
3. I almost got the people in the car behind me hurt, too, and that's something I couldn't have lived with.
So, yeah. If you feel like someone is about to crank you and tell you that you’re about to die and that the devil has claimed your soul: DO NOT PICK UP THE PHONE!
That's my brilliant life lesson here. Don't pick up the phone if the devil is calling, or even if you just think it's a scam caller who is going to send the 'local cops' after you. Life is too short to have the evil beside you or in front of you or blabbering on into your ear. Put it behind you where it belongs.
But this thought also ventures a bit into the land of false beliefs, about how ideas die when you don’t think about them.
James Clear wrote, “Silence is death for any idea. An idea that is never spoken or written down dies with the person who conceived it. Ideas can only be remembered when they are repeated. They can only be believed when they are repeated.”
I forget about that phone call. The idea that Satan is coming to get me is pretty much gone out of my head for 99.9% of my time, right? That’s a good thing. It’s like other worries and fears and worst-case scenarios, I put it away. The same goes for local news or town government. The more we focus on the bad, the more bad there seems to be. That doesn’t mean we should ignore it. It just means it should be all there is.
Clear writes, ”Before you can criticize an idea, you have to reference that idea. You end up repeating the ideas you’re hoping people will forget—but, of course, people can’t forget them because you keep talking about them. The more you repeat a bad idea, the more likely people are to believe it.
“Let’s call this phenomenon Clear’s Law of Recurrence: The number of people who believe an idea is directly proportional to the number of times it has been repeated during the last year—even if the idea is false.
“Each time you attack a bad idea, you are feeding the very monster you are trying to destroy. As one Twitter employee wrote, “Every time you retweet or quote tweet someone you’re angry with, it helps them. It disseminates their BS. Hell for the ideas you deplore is silence. Have the discipline to give it to them.”
Y”our time is better spent championing good ideas than tearing down bad ones. Don’t waste time explaining why bad ideas are bad. You are simply fanning the flame of ignorance and stupidity.
“The best thing that can happen to a bad idea is that it is forgotten. The best thing that can happen to a good idea is that it is shared. It makes me think of Tyler Cowen’s quote, ‘Spend as little time as possible talking about how other people are wrong.’”
LINK TO LEARN MORE
