The Insider never has been one for keeping New Year’s resolutions, so she stopped making them way back when cavemen were just cavemen and not a sitcom with a prime-time slot.
But she is resolved to give Deborah Norville’s “Thank You Power” regimen of positive thinking, laid out in a manageably sized new book by the “Inside Edition” anchor, an honest-to-you-know-who try.
That insidious thought first occurred after a recent breakfast with Ms. Norville left The Insider on a nice, warm high that could not be dampened by the gray, rainy day.
It’s simply impossible to listen to Ms. Norville, who has had to turn some bruiser lemons into lemonade more than once in her life and career, and not wonder if there’s not something to learn from her upbeatness, her energy and her choice to view setbacks as “lessons learned. You don’t really learn when you win,” she believes.
The Insider was going to tell Ms. Norville of her lingering effect at the “Thank You Power” book party last week at Michael’s, the multimedia watering hole in midtown Manhattan. But a preseason bug landed The Insider in bed for several days.
It was bad news. Even the best won-ton soup gets old on the fifth straight day of delivery.
There was worse news—no one will deliver cigarettes in The Insider’s neighborhood—that one also could choose to look at as good news.
By the time The Insider was up to leaving her apartment building, she’d been five days without a cigarette.
The Insider is confident that she will have gone at least 10 days without a cigarette by the time you read this. When the twinges and reflexes forged by decades of smoking try to assert themselves, The Insider is—knock wood and thank you, Deborah Norville—choosing to be thankful they are not worse. That has—knock wood and thank you, Lexapro—reduced the power of those moments and made them resistible one ambush at a time.
The Insider chooses to think of it as wearing a Norville patch. And to think it’s working.