On Fear

It's an upper, I promise!

Some fears (spiders, the dark, etc) are able to be faced directly. My worst ones are more subtle, pernicious things… Am I meeting myself directly enough? Am I a good person? Am I making the right choices? And although every single person in the universe could offer their opinion, none of them are going to be right or wrong. In the meantime, loving the person I am feels like a good idea.

The crux of it is this… I’m not comfortable with not knowing everything perfectly right away. I’m not comfortable with not knowing precisely how life will turn out. And I am certainly not comfortable with being afraid. Naturally, I’m quite ashamed of that, as it conflicts with the peaceful, wise version of myself that I like to be. I can still find and feel that person, but sometimes my body is on anxious strike, so I’m nauseous, and I’m not as present as I want to be, and I feel very ashamed of that.

Music has felt like a lot lately, which sucks a little bit. When I am not stuck in taking every lyric personally, sometimes just the noise feels too overwhelming, but that I’ve always dealt with to an extent. I am just noticing more these days.

Today, on my car ride back to Chicago, I listened to (and sang along with) Hamilton, In The Heights, 21 Chump Street, a couple of songs from Newsies, and a good bit of Rent. It didn’t feel perfect, but I touched into that auspicious core of myself, who trips forward into life on tiptoes and probably wears the silks I played with as a little person. This has to be a step in the right direction.

College graduation is nigh, and after that happens I won’t have grades to tell me that I did something well or poorly or just okay anymore. The future is a silent space into which I can build whatever I want, but right now, I think the important part is sitting in the silence. In the early phases of sitting in my silence, I have found a lot of fear, and that fear attacks everything I hold dear in an effort to understand itself or explain itself away. There must be a reason I’m afraid and it’s not good enough that that reason could just be that life is changing, or that some part of my person that I can’t even touch senses that a baby bird fell out of its nest… these reasons are just as good as any terrible ones that I have come up with in my quest for self “knowledge” (here, instead, read taking intrusive thoughts very seriously and then proceeding to approach them with logic… ha).

Anxiety is urgent, it demands that you handle it RIGHT NOW and when the anxiety you’re trying to handle is amorphous and impossible to measure, a person can start to feel kind of impotent. There is this need to be bigger than the fear, to show the fear who is boss, to strangle the fear, to prove it wrong… This doesn’t work and it probably gives amorphous fear way too much power anyway.

My fear wants me to stay very still. It thinks that if I hold my breath out for forever before breathing in again, nothing terrible can exist in that breathless space. I challenge it almost every day with yoga and some days with running too. Sometimes that sucks and I feel anxious anyway. Or, I put too much stock into the fact that I won’t feel anxious when I’m done that I’m not even happy with the less-anxious amount of anxiety and I see that as a failure and something that should probably rile me up again. Right? Hmm…

Running is actually a decent vehicle into my understanding of my own fear… I started running pretty recently and had shockingly really been enjoying it. I started out pacing myself very well (running quite slowly and taking plenty of walking breaks) and would then get so excited at the end of the run that I would sprint home. I also wouldn’t stretch much before or after. This gave me heinous knee pain. I started googling, spinning out, watching different running pre-workout videos (fun right?) and generally leaning into doom. Running couldn’t be for me because I encountered an obstacle on my path into it… Womp womp. Having fun exercising doesn’t happen automatically when you’ve addressed the eating disorder you guys… Well, anyway, I started doing extensive pre and post run yoga, walking for at least five minutes before running, and giving myself plenty of breaks. And guess what… I just ran a 5k on Easter with my friend Helena and it felt totally doable! Patience, kindness, and a minimum of Google and over-analysis can only serve all of us well.

Becoming the adult I want to be is going to take time and flexibility. There is no fast track, and no one is going to tell me or any of us what we’re doing right or wrong. There actually is no right or wrong, there is just a life that is yours and that is beautiful and that is not being wasted by periods of struggle. We are all, until the day we die, at work finding our place. I am at work with silence, with unplanned time, with not quite being sure how it is all going to come together. I’m at work with self-criticism, with pushing myself without shoving myself, with being present. Mostly importantly, I’m at work with loving the world.

In sitting with my fear, to varying degrees of success, I have discovered that a lot of stuff exists inside fearfulness. There exists existentialism, irrationality, and unanswerable questions that really only serve to create closed loops of nausea. There exists also inspiration, beautiful moments of vulnerability and deeper connectedness, and the opportunity for a lot of being laid bare. When we’re hyper sensitive, it’s about choosing, to varying degrees of success, better places to apply our sensitivity. I am watching a robin’s nest in the tree outside my window in Chicago. I am watching my dog fall in love with my boyfriend. I am also watching for signs of a giant lion in the corner that is my fault and that is bent on destroying all I hold dear. Oh, well.

Right now, I am scared and I am so full of love. I am about to move into a new apartment. I am graduating college. I cherish getting dressed in the morning. I just went to the dentist for the first time in five years and I didn’t have cavities! This weekend I experienced one perfect day, which simply involved waking up with my partner, taking my dog on a glorious hike, and hanging out in the sun with a group of good folks.

If you, too, are feeling afraid or stuck in spirals, I really, really understand. Your deep inner wisdom is there. Fairies are flying through the most vicious of your spirals, seeing sweet things and planting seeds for better moments. I don’t know that there was a huge point to any of this, but for the fact that I have some spaciousness today and I wanted to write, and that feels true.

I love you guys!