Nagging
Nagging is a pretty vague topic for discussion because the types of nags and the types of naggers are so broad. You can be nagged by a grumpy spouse, nagged by a sneaking suspicion, nagged by a clock radio’s alarm, heck you can even be nagged by nagging back pain. The vast spectrum of pesky harassments is so wide and deep, it is a lucky thing we are alive to be nagged. That’s right, I feel that nagging is one of those practices that through the sheer stress and anxiety it produces, is capable of causing heart disease, cancer,ulcers, stroke, and male pattern baldness.
Vague and deadly. That is quite a combination going on there. It’s as if nagging could be considered a creepy, smoky poison that creeps under the crack of a nursery room door on its way to killing the baby. And that is just how I treat nagging and how I treat people who nag. Naggers are poisonous. They mean well when they constantly remind us of the same things our mind constantly reminds us. Gee, thanks I totally forgot about that court appearance I have to put in this morning…
It is a sad fact that most naggers are people that are close to us. Mothers , wives, daughters, sons, husbands and friends are all the guilty parties here, it is rare that you are nagged by some stranger on the street. Certainly bills and shut off notices are nagging letters that come in the mail, but on the long scale of nagging they are but brief pips rather than the big culprits here.
The type of nagger that really gets me is someone who is supposed to be close to you. People who “know” you and “love” you. Don’t they see that you are stressing about something? If they know you well enough to claim that they love you, don’t they see your furrowed brow? Don’t they see the bottle of antacids in your pocket? Why do they need to remind us of our shortcomings? Why do they feel the need to repeat what our mind has been replaying over and over again?
When asked these questions, most people close to me are indignant. They are offended by my apparent refusal of their sage help, but that is not why I asked the questions. I asked them those questions because I want to know if they make a habit of having morons for friends.
What? Yes, that’s right. People who continually nag a friend think that friend is a moron. Doing something in the guise of help doesn’t really help; it only sparks a hidden flame of anger. Nobody likes to be reminded of bad things, if they do, they aren’t sane. If a person can’t pay their gas bill, forgets an important appointment, or needs to have his brakes checked do you really think it is assisting them or making their life easier to repeat what letters, phone calls and warning pins are already doing? Friends should “tell you something you don’t know.” I stand by my initial statement: naggers think their friends are morons.
I will go one step further. Since it is a well known fact that stress and anxiety are recognized health issues, and since we have established that nagging can contribute to stress and anxiety, I will just toss this out there: people who nag are trying to kill you. They may not even know it, but they are. They are as deadly as second hand cigarette smoke.
My brother is a very fine man. He is upright, faithful, smart, and he is honest to the point of being painful. He would never knowingly do anything to kill me. I am not afraid to say I love him and he is the same way. We are very close, even if we do not see each other as much as we used to or as much as we want. For all that closeness, for all that honesty and uprightness my brother is killing me!
Over the years, he has shared his concerns for me with me. That’s a nice way of saying he has nagged me ceaselessly to become a better person. I usually sit there, nodding and smiling. I like to let him get it all out first so that we can go on and be productive. He doesn’t know what kind of hell he puts me through when he does these things, and he never will unless he reads this stuff. So yeah, he’ll probably never know, and I don’t ever want him to. I like him enough to not share.
Back a few years ago, the company I worked for went out of business. Many of the eight thousand people who worked for the company were left high and dry. Some even lost their retirement pensions. It was a sad ending for a company that had enjoyed success in this area for many decades. Some employees were not stupid. They had been saving, moving 401k stocks around, taking their retirement cash early, or being just plain bought out before the axe could fall. I was one of those people and I left with a sizable chunk of cash in my pocket. I wasn’t one of the desperate people, complaining on the news about the way they had been treated by the company and how they were now jobless and woe is me.
My brother, God bless him, was one of the people watching those news reports. The very day I had closed down my office and packed up my desk, he arrived at my house with a care package under his arm and a list of job offers. He didn’t understand that I didn’t need those things. I was going to be okay. He even looked offended when I explained to him that I had gotten out with a nice bit of cash. What he had seen on the news had not prepared him for what was really going on.
Also, he thought that I was a moron because, like the morons on the news, I just had to be in the same boat…and a moron like me would never prepare himself for what was the inevitable.
