I’ve let fear become a familiar trap within my mind. It has permeated to just about every single aspect of my life and has held me back from growing and making necessary changes. I’ve masked it as just having anxiety, of just being anxious and needing everything to happen a certain way. In reality, I am simply just scared. Scared of the unknown, scared of my own feelings, scared of any sort of change.
I’ve always found it interesting looking back at different times in my life and reflecting on the experiences I have had. Recently, looking back I only feel frustration. I wasn’t scared before, and if I was then I was able to overcome it. In high school I didn’t think twice about going somewhere alone, in fact I tried my very hardest to do as much as I could by myself. I then went off to college on the other side of the state. Making my own way, getting my own apartments and not having someone there for me 24/7. I figured things out on my own, and loved having my own place. I never would have imagined moving back to Pittsburgh, let alone back in with my parents two years ago.
Now it seems like the last two years have been filled with nothing but fear for me. For the first few months it was fear I would never not be anxious, then it was fear over whether or not my dad was going to live, and now it is fear that I will be scared for the rest of my life.That the weight that has been sitting on my chest and hovering in my mind is now a permanent fixture. And all of this fear is holding me back. I am letting it stop me from going to the gym, going for a walk, meeting up with friends. I think of driving myself to the gym and I am scared I will have a panic attack while driving there. I want to go get lunch with friends, I am scared I am going to panic while driving there and am too far from home. It has somehow gotten to the point where everything I try and do there is an element of fear in it.
A lot of the time I cover it up as being anxiety and people are generally more understanding of that. I can’t help my anxiety, it’s a brain chemical imbalance, it is out of my control, whatever excuse they make for me is somehow better than simply being scared. Half the time I don’t even agree on a principle level to what they’re saying, I just can’t bring myself to correct them and then have to somehow explain what my actual problem is. None of this is to discount my anxiety either, I get panic attacks and I do overthink and ruminate. I have lived with the overwhelming feeling that something else is just about to happen and I better be prepared. But it is my fear of these thoughts and feelings that hold me back the most. The thoughts themselves can be rather innocuous, the weight I put on the thoughts either consciously or subconsciously is what stokes the fear.
That is where I am now getting stuck. I know my problem is fear, and I have faced it thousands of times in my life in different shapes and forms.This time around it is almost as if it has taken root deeper than ever before. It is no longer something that I am able to think my way out of, there is no reasoning with the fear that takes over. I could present every logical argument in the world to one of my fears and as if it was a person, it would scoff and turn away.
I have an opportunity to face one of my fears. One based on past experiences and complicated brain wiring and rewiring. What the opportunity is doesn’t necessarily matter, it is a universal feeling of something different is about to happen- what do I do? How do I shut down and hide and stay safe? My instinct when I used to have any type of anxiety would be mixed with excitement even if there was a bit of fear. It is now just fear and dread of what could potentially happen. It makes me upset even just typing that out.
That’s the thing about fear and anxiety, they latch on to any and everything and the more you feed into it the more it grows. I am now stuck in a loop of feeding into my fear and letting it grow bigger and bigger to the point where if I don’t do something soon then it will take over my life completely.
Instead of trying to soothe myself and talk my way out of the fear, from now on I am going to try and simply sit with it. As of right now I have no clue what that looks like and what results it may bring, but instead of running away I want to try and simply be with it. Taking a page out of mindfulness practices, I’m very curious to see if this will in fact make a difference or not. When I start to feel myself getting scared I am going to dive into the feeling and try my hardest to simply be there and whatever it is my mind is trying to trick me into thinking. Running away from it has not worked, and the constant running has now compounded into more fear.
So for now, I am still scared. I still don’t have the life I want, nor the body or the mindset either. But I have myself, and not much to lose by trying a different approach.
