Fear

I woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning. My alarm went off about 9:30. I am never up till mid-afternoon and honestly I so wish I had my own place so I would not feel guilty and lazy for lying in bed all day. Staying in bed all day for a length of time can actually be the best thing for self-care when you’re depressed but when you start feeling guilty about it that is just a no goid spiral. Anyway, my host immediately asked if that alarm meant I was fetting up when in all honesty I would have liked to sleep for five more hours.

He was incredibly anxious to get more vegan items to test for lactose (the deadline for this paper he is writing is coming up really soon; he is grateful that I got him to think about vegan things which will be an important part of his paper). I felt bad and kind if nervous and criticised and agitated because he said the stuff I ended up buying a few days ago that he offered to pay half the cost of wasn’t actually what he wanted for his research. I pretended I was ready to get up and he wanted me to come with him to a grocery store to look for items labeled vegan that are specifically not meat substitutes. (And, by the way, actually 8 out of 8 vegan products he has tested so far do not have pactose, contrary to what I might have implied before). In the store I heard a song that usually makes me feel happy but I was grumpy and depressed and sensitive and vulnerable and it actually made me feel kind of paranoid. As we drove back the felt sense of everything reminded me somehow of a drive to Ikea with my ex and her mom. I don’t really know what that is about but that is a lot of the stuff I have to start to heal…

Then I tried to call my mother and when I couldn’t reach her right away I started panicking… and judging myself for being so reliant on her being there. For a while it felt hopeless like maybe she was never there for me anyway and I don’t know if I could have lived with that so feeling once again like she is at least not unsupportive when I talk to her on the phone means a lot… but I have no one else to talk to, at least no one so comforting in a certain sort of worn in way, and not being able to reach her today made me feel like the bottom was dropping out of my life. If everything has gone wrong and she’s not there I just don’t know what I’d do.

I just felt a huge amount of fear today and listening Tara Brach wasn’t helping, wasn’t validating how much I have every reason to be scared of my life and where it is going and how it might end… and I just don’t think I have the strength to take care of myself without my mother around in some way. Which means I am pretty terrified of my future no matter what comes of it…

I did not think anyone would be able to say comforting things but Thich Nhat Hanh at the beginning of his book Fear points out exactly what I have been afraid of with surprising specificity.

“We are afraid of things outside of ourselves that we cannot control. We worry about becoming ill, aging, and losing the things we treasure most. We try to hold tight to the things we care about—our positions, our property, our loved ones. But holding tightly doesn’t ease our fear. Eventually, one day, we will have to let go of all of them. We cannot take them with us.” Oh, the horror, he is not going to be able to help either because I need to take them with me!!! Then I read: “To be mindful means to look deeply, to touch our true nature of interbeing and recognize that nothing is ever lost.” Oh, good. I’ll keep reading…

“Our greatest fear is that when we die we will become nothing. To really be free of fear, we must look deeply into the ultimate dimension to see our true nature of no-birth and no-death. We need to free ourselves from these ideas that we are just our bodies, which die. When we understand that we are more than our physical bodies, that we didn’t come from nothingness and will not disappear into nothingness, we are liberated from fear.” This is kind of comforting though I have felt worse than nothing so much lately and so not disappearing into nothingness when I die, I don’t know how much of a comfort yhat is, but maybe it’s something.

“As infants, each one of us knew that to survive, we had to get someone to take care of us. Even after our umbilical cord was cut, we still had to rely entirely on adults to survive. When you depend on someone or something else to survive, it means that a link, a kind of invisible umbilical cord, is still there between you.

When we grow up, our original fear and original desire are still there. Although we are no longer babies, we still fear that we cannot survive, that no one will take care of us. Every desire we will have in our lives has its root in this original, fundamental desire to survive. As babies, we all find ways to ensure our survival. We may have felt very powerless. We had legs but couldn’t walk. We had hands but couldn’t grasp anything. We had to figure out how to get someone else to protect us, take care of us, and ensure our survival.”

And I’m not sure but still I find it comforting and it speaks to the source of my fears quite well: “For most of us, our original fear continues in some form. Sometimes we might feel scared of being alone. We may feel that ‘alone I can’t make it; I have to have somebody.’ This is a continuation of our original fear. If we look deeply, however, we will find that we have the capacity to calm our fear and find our own happiness.”

So I ate some realy yummy vegan cajun chicken pieces with a lebanese sauce and avocado, partly in a sandwich, partly on the side. I looked into going to Thailand, thought the language barrier might be too much too soon since I am not ready for other languages when I am still focused on Spanish, and looked up flights to Barcelona instead. I would almost book but I am not quite sure. Hard to know where I will be a month from now and I want to make sure I am not in the middle of a crisis that keeps me from going. Also I just didn’t feel up for researching accommodation and transportation and such but I am still thinking about it. Perhaps Colombia too? I am itching to travel but I don’t know how much I am up for which is so annoying.

Then I had a really good meeting tonight. I shared some big stuff I haven’t yet shared with anyone and got it off my chest. The host of the meeting was exceptionally caring and stayed with me an hour afterwards to talk and to make sure I had some support and to hear more about me and such things. Of course I wanted to run away rather than aaaah be the last one left at a meeting striking up a conversation with the host but at least I didn’t die. Someone shared really vulnerably in a way that inspired me and was sooo much like how I sabotaged myself in ways I beat myself up about forever except he did it with sooo much less provocation… which made it so relatable and human and gave me compassion for myself going through something similar. My heart softened to him. I felt so free of stuff I had been holding onto like, this isn’t so bad, I can talk to people about this. I was told I was courageous. Someone said it was relatable when I talked about difficulties trusting friends…

And I want more practice doing that. More practice being grounded and real as opposed to flying over the cuckoo’s nest. I think I am going to reach out tomorrow to see if this retreat centre would schedule another meeting with me… even after I sent them a couple journal entries that they might evaluate and use as a reason not to let me come back. I have been growing, and working on myself, believe it or not, and with this energy of what I’d been holding in now beginning to clear, I feel… a willingness to trust to the extent that I do hope they let me come, or at least, I hope they are genuinely open to having me. I told them I did not want to be welcomed if I am not actually liked. In my desire to be honest and share the process I am going theough, though, I may have said too much; maybe that is why they still have not gotten back to me, though we said we’f have another meeting around the end of September. I don’t think I would be too disappointed but it would kind if suck if just when my intuition was starting to be all in on giving them a chance they ended up telling me I’m not welcome anyway. Whatever happens, I trust, is for the best… and while I know I have been a troublemaker of sorts in the past, but I realise I have something to offer (itonically at the same time I so fear that I don’t), and I hope I can experience a sort of reconciliation, but I think if they choose not to welcome me, it is kind of their loss…

I want to believe that life is worth investing in, worth committing to, considering I am going to have to let it all go one day in the most uncertain and likely torturously painful ways. What is the point of giving myself fully to life when these are the eventual outcomes I fear? I hate that I even ask myself that; but sometimes everything that used to give you excitement is just blah and actually not a reason to keep going… but maybe a moment of honest connection with others who really care reminds me that life *is* worth living despite the uncertainty and despite my worst fears of how it all could end. I go from feeling so depressed and hopeless and drained of life energy to relatively grounded and peaceful, not necessarily passionate about things that I love that I wish could capture my attention more, but at least doing okay, and then the next wave of feeling depressed and hopeless comes… and connection is a key to healing, it is just so hard to trust sometimes that the next opportunities for connection will come.