a pattern of Nancys

This might seem like an odd post. I agree.

Nancys seem to be my personal Karens. I've only very recently realized this is a pattern over many years.

My first Nancy living here is my mail carrier, so we go back 30 years. She has so regularly 'lost' or misplaced mail that I finally got a post office box for my own personal mail so the neighbors wouldn't know my daughter's life from her prolific snail mails holding long handwritten letters. Getting anything returned to us out of kindness is hit or miss, especially as some of our neighbors are antiquating alcoholics and 'hippies' so far gone on meds or drugs that the rest of their lives have been a litany of people dying off over the years all around us through cancers and whatnot. One story that still lives in quiet infamy in all our back closets is a neighbor shooting at her husband or something. She was a real mess. What makes it more fun is looking around the nice neighborhood sliding into grandchildren on meth across every so many houses. But back to Mail Carrier Nancy. She gets migraines and often simply skips our box if the flag isn't up (which is so rare any more since I found a piece of outgoing mail laying in the mud after it slipped unnoticed out of her hand), and then piling all week's mail into the box on one day. Ah, yes,  you can see how the mixups happens. I've picked up stacks of neighbor mail out of my box on odd months. This really isn't helped by substitute carriers who fill in for her on sick days or school out early days or looming holidays or whatever. I just know that if we're getting a neighbor's water bill, it's easy to see how we miss getting our own bill sometimes.

Case in point. Around 25 years ago, give or take, I ordered an expensive leather NFL team jacket for my husband for Christmas. Christmas came and went, the jacket never showed up. But the bill did. Interesting. I called the company and let them know I never received the package and would therefore not be paying for it. They set up an investigation and promised to prosecute if I were lying. A later call revealed that the package had, indeed, arrived at my post office and had been documented in Nancy's care. From there- nothing. They never found it, probably dropped off at the wrong house and a very delighted neighbor selling it on ebay or something, which was all the rage back then, and nothing was ever said to me through the post office. The company dropped the whole thing. Nowadays packages get scanned out to individual houses because everything is digital now.

My second Nancy showed up as a part timer at a retail store I full timed in for nearly 5 years. She was nonstop yappy and a bit absentminded and everyone knew her entire life story, all her family member names and problems, and where she worked full time. The really interesting month was when she got bitten by a brown recluse and put off going to a doctor until her arm was half 'bruised', and by then it was too late to do anything about it. Took about a month to heal, and she continued yapping through her busy little workload. Then things got disturbing. She approached me with the news that my check hadn't got through her billing at a huge medical network. That was a shock, finding out she was a billing specialist and could see all my services through whichever doctors and, instead of calling me privately from the correct office, she was approaching me publicly in the middle of my job. Up to that point, no one knew I was struggling to hold a full time job with severe enough problems to be pulled over and even driven home occasionally for driving too slowly on big meds, and a few years later would wind up in full bankruptcy and total disability. Nancy did try to be nice about it, but the approach was so wrong that I lost all confidence in her as a coworker and distanced myself as much as possible. Some people just don't have sharing filters and the last thing I needed was what started happening- management shadowing me and seeming to push me harder and harder, even through heart surgery, until I finally did have to quit. I loved that job, was very good at it, even told by multiple people that everything fell apart after I left, but the pressure to work myself to death or quit over the last few years (especially after my mom started having strokes) got ridiculous. Anyway, Nancy seemed to be my turning point somehow.

My third Nancy is only lately encountered in a church group, and aside from a mild enough personality rub to be able to initially ignore, was so benign that I never gave it a second thought. It was the kind of group we're all supposed to develop close friendships in, and we all took turns spilling all our stuff. It was a lot like a group with a psychologist, but way better. I loved meeting up and getting to know everyone. I could tell Nancy wasn't used to opening up that much, things being more on a controlled surface level type reveal with her, and I say that with nearly 2 decades of experience with a psychologist and psychiatrist. But it was all good, we all go on our paths at our own paces, and like I said, I didn't think that much of it. There's really no comparison from person to person how big a reveal is, it's not a competition, but the gist is that the more deeply honest a person can become, the less anxiety and more trust a person develops, opening us up to more genuine relationships and loving interactions. I was so ready for that, but I don't think Nancy has reached a comfortable enough level yet to let down her guard. Anyway, we had a group text going for prayers and sharing, and one day I guess I triggered her 'mom response', and while everyone else just let it flow over (admitting I have a social media addiction that goes back years and was using group support to wean off), apparently she wasn't used to a 'flooded feed' and having to filter past irrelevance and got after me in front of the whole group, effectively and quite demonstrably 'killing' the more sharing part of the feed from that point on. Again, no one else said a word, I simply acknowledged and left it alone, and it's been fairly dead in that group text ever since, not counting very basic keeping in light touch stuff, and even that seems to be over.

We've all moved on to new groups as the semester changed, and I've already seen her approaching an overseer of groups on feedback about her group, going over facilitator and bypassing group discussion about whatever it was. She feels the need to assess and report, which seems a bit childish to me, especially considering that she's got at least 6 years on me. She's nice about it and all, but like I said, very surfacy. What she sees as depth is other people splashing her with normal interaction. She's not used to it. In her mind the facilitators need to handle things better, perhaps, and the other participants need to act differently, maybe. I dunno. But yeah, that's extremely childish. I just know I'm glad she's not in my new group. I don't need her chiding grinding everyone else to a halt. I'm used to chiding (and much worse) from years of public media, most everyone else is not. It really bugs me that all it takes is one judgy person to quell a group who otherwise was doing fine. Most people justify that as 'being polite', but what they are being is controlled. They're not helping the judgy person doing it that way.

For some reason this morning while I was working on some chores, all 3 Nancys popped into my head and I noticed this pattern. They all fall short of 'professional' level growth, and they all affected me personally. What's even weirder is that if you could stand them all side by side, they'd look so much alike that they'd all look related. Is that weird? So if Nancys are happening across my time on earth, and they are all triggering me the same way and even look like a glitch in the matrix pattern, this is about me. I'm the one who needs to pick up a lesson from this. What if this is actually a test? What if I am tested regularly? Maybe this is part of my own learning program, and the pattern is set for me to catch on and develop past that kind of stuff bothering me.

That's actually a very liberating thought.