Thinking in Pictures 2

Being a visual thinker, I associate words with images.  Some images, however, are not blue skies and pretty flowers.  Unlike a computer, whatever my brain chooses to retain, I cannot delete.  I also have no control over which image to use as the default.

When I was 12 yo, my grandmother made me eat a rotten banana by accident.  I did not like fruits as a child.  My grandmother, for health reasons, would force me to consume them on a regular basis.

I could still remember myself sitting in the brown sofa in our flat.  My grandmother handed me a banana.  I told my grandmother I didn't want it.  My grandmother insisted for me to eat it.  Knowing I wasn't going to be able to get away with it, I took it from her.

I unpeeled the banana and bite into it.  Ew....there was something wrong with it.  The texture was awful and the color in the center had a funny orange hue.  I told my grandmother it was rotten.  My grandmother thought I was trying to make excuses and refused to listen to me.  She sternly told me to finish it and walked into the kitchen.  Being an obedient child, I painstakingly ate the banana, using my front teeth to take off a thin layer at a time. 

Twenty minutes later, when grandma came out of the kitchen, I only ate a third of the banana.  She rolled her eyes at me, shook her head, took my banana and said she was going to eat it for me.  The second she bite into it, she frowned and spat it out.  "Why didn't you tell me it was rotten?  Why were you eating it?"

It was too late.  Image of that rotten banana was burnt into my memory.  From then on, I never enjoyed bananas again.  Every time I think of bananas, memory of that awful texture and funny color would take over.  I have no choice but to re-live the experience.  I have tried to replace the default picture associated with bananas to no avail.  My brain has decided that bananas will always be rotten.  

There are so many of these banana type stories.  Like the time when my aunt ran out of our kitchen in Hong Kong screaming.  I ran over to see a bag of skinless headless frogs, one of them hopping around on the kitchen counter like it was looking for its head.  Fortunately, that image was more amusing than traumatizing, so I could still eat frog legs with gusto.

Then there was my encounter with a sick fish in the common courtyard of our flat in Hong Kong.  I was maybe 11 or 12, taking a stroll around the courtyard.  I was on top of a little bridge, looking into the fish pond.  There I saw it, a sick fish, with all of its scales sticking straight out from its body.  It gave me the chills.  Goose bumps formed all over me, darn, it was too late.  I could never see a fish the same way again. 

As I got older, I gained a better understanding of how my brain worked.  I realize that if I want to fill my mind with positivity, I have to be diligent in preventing my brain from burning unwanted images into my hard drive.  I may not be able to control the images my brain wants to retain, but if I catch it in time, I can blur out the association so the bond is not formed.

With time, I've found that under proper guidance, not only can I prevent my mind from being burdened with bad images, I can even turn what can be a curse into a blessing.