MY GREATEST FEAR

FEAR

I lied below. Sort of. Only half of the story is in the post below, if not less.

 

Note: You wouldn't believe the fight inside of me right now trying not to lie to all of you or to myself.

 

Yes, in that moment, when I saw that movie, a motherly instinct turned on for the first time in my life. It had flickered before, but those events were nothing compared to the flood gates of unconditional love that overpoured for a family I don't even have yet and might never have.

 

Yes, Stills Disease and coming that close to my own mortality and morality also made me become more empathetic and love more unconditionally than I ever did before I got sick...but there is so much more fear here than the thought of potentialy hurting others.

 

I mean, ok, so yes, I hate hurting people's feelings. I love to be love and that fuels my need to be kind. I almost need to be liked--I was raised to be a peacemaker and a caregiver, and despite my physical setbacks I like to think I still am when I can be. I did choose sports medicine after all, a health care field, which tends to scream that I take care of others better than I take care of myself--but just like everyone else, I still look out for my well being just as much as the rest of you, if not more, because of what I've been through, because of Stills--because of what I've lost.

 

I had some walls and fences and traps around me before I got sick, but they were mainly to stop someone from slowing me down on my way to my "perfect plan" for my future. But when I lost every part of that plan, and when friends and family didn't know how to deal with me going through a very deep and dark depression, it felt like I was losing everything. And I mean everything!

 

Within just two very short years I truly thought I had lost everything and everyone. I wholeheartedly, but falsely, believed there was nothing left to lose and I thought there would never be a worse feeling than that--I couldn't...I don't even want to tell you how it gets worse, because...because it hurts that much.

 

My last therapy session could explain it all to you, and all the ones that were so similar to it. All those kleenex I go through, how I feel I am always the ONLY one who goes back to the waiting room crying hoping I don't have snot all over my face. How my therapist and I are stuck on this same subject and I swear, she is good and kind and caring and is starting to really understand me, but I don't think she can fix this fear...I even started reading The Tibetan Book and Living And Dying again because the impermanence of all this--Son of Jor-El I hate that word--all this that used to feel like nothing, it's truly and honestly my greatest fear.

 

Anyone else suddenly feeling nauseous and anxious and shaky? Or is it just me for telling the entire Internet my greatest fear?

Rumi says that where there is ruin, there is hope for burried treasure.

Anne Lamott talks of "all that we lose, yet all that remains".

Man I was drowning back then, when I thought I truly had nothing left to lose!

 

And now?! Now, the thing I'm most afraid of, is all that I have left to lose!

 

 

In a matter of a couple years I went from thinking I had nothing left, to knowing I had everything left. Suffering does that. "It eliminates the unnecessary" says Rob Bell.

 

I lost the trivial accessories in my life that I clung to like they were the foundation. Like softball, sports, school (an institutionalized education that excitedly pits kid against kid on an invisible yet emphasized and noticeable hierarchy instead encouraging the love of learning or encouraging their ability to hold themselves accountable without an authority figure or scale to make them do so), friends and family who turned out not to really be either, and a job...and a dream. Nonetheless, all of these were empty identities that could never measure my true worth to the world or myself or to God.

 

Had I not been taught, or had I not wanted to grasp onto such emptiness, God never would have had to eliminate them. But I did. I loved them. More than Him, and when they were taken from me, it unbearably felt like I had nothing left to lose.

 

I don't care who you are, or what you've lost, there is always more to lose. Just give it time. Trust me.

 

Angelus: Now that's everything, huh? No weapons... No friends...No hope. Take all that away... and what's left?

Buffy: Me.

When God removed all the useless excessiveness and unnecessariness from my life, and after I realized it was exactly that, things, life, even I was different.

I hate to say that the sky was bluer and the clouds were fluffier and the grass greener, but they were! They really were, eventually.

The sun made me happier. Rain was more magical and more healing and made me breathe a little easier. Everything was just, more important, I guess? I don't know. It's as if what little was left was able to expand and stretch into the open spaces of my heart and soul and mind where the unneccessary used to be. And the people who stuck with me, who never gave up on me, who no matter how busy or tired they were/are still found/find the time for me...I finally love and appreciate them in a way that probably leads to me annoying them as I tell them over and over how much I love them and miss them and are thankful for them. I truly worry they get sick of me making a big deal out of their love for me, but I just need them to know their love for someone like me, it is rare and few and far between. And it deserves praise. I smile just thinking about these people. They are extraordinary and they don't even know it.

And that's my greatest fear...losing all that remains, but mostly, losing the people who remained. Most specifically, my mom and dad. I literally and emotionally don't believe I could get through one second without them. They do more for me and love me more than anyone else can imagine, more than I could explain....

If you lost what I've lost, and lost it as young and as quickly as I did, and if you had people get too busy (and mostly rightly so, but still) for you and abandon you, and the people who do actually still care and take the time for you were out of state or 600 miles away or more...that's what sucks! Only through experience could you understand my sense of loss, and I would never want you to understand it if that's what it would take...

You don't know what it's like, most of you, to be overwhelming aware of loss, and to have only two people who can really BE THERE for you... And even if there were more, back to the post below, how dare I ask that much of you--taking care of me is a full time job. I'm an adult, an elderly person, a disabled person, a baby, a child, and a parent throughout the day. I'm a complex case that I often feel is too much to even ask my parents to take care of, but the beauty of parents, is you don't have to ask. Then again, once you're an adult, and you still need them in the ways I do, it's also a burden--to me and to them, in different ways, whether any of us will openly admit it or more likely not.

So when my therapist, despite how wonderful she is, tells me I can't or shouldn't worry about losing them, I want to think she is crazy and doesn't get me at all, or what I've been through and have yet to go through. But also, a part of what she is saying is good for me; it's just hard. I'm grasping onto what I feel is all I have left, my parents, when I should be grasping onto God.

Impermanence. God, I'm telling you, I hate that word. You set all this up around us and it feels so real, so true. It feels like it could and should last forever sometimes, mainly because it's all we know, but it truly is a dream within a dream. An illusion, impermanent. But boy do we hold on to it like this is all their is! And it slowly begins to feel like, if you are paying attention, like life is nothing more than a constant reminder that none of this will last. As if every second, as it passes away into nothing, is a reminder this is all temporary. This second is no longer that second is no longer that second is no longer that second and so an. An endless successiveness of change. None of this real. Too soon it will be what was. This is just the wedding rehearsal, not the happily ever after.

Walls, fences, ditches, traps, ha-ha's, security systems, we all, have them. Especially me. Yes for the reasons in the post below, but mostly, because of my intense sense of loss, and my greatest fear of losing all I think is left. I'm afraid of the impermanence, the inevitable pain that comes when either I let you down, or you let me down. I'm afraid of hurting and even more so, of getting hurt.

I almost desperately long to make new friends, to date, to reconnect with old friends, and to spend more time with my extended family, and at the same time, I subconsciously and occasionally consciously, keep a safe distance from everyone and everything, for fear of losing even more than I already have. And I am successful. I keep my distance...with everyone and everything except for two people and two dogs.

Within these 1200 square feet I live in 99% of my days, I cling with all I've got to what I feel is all I've got left: my mom, my dad, and our two dogs.

Because I never leave the house but for doctors appointments and a rare, rare outing, I can't put up any walls or fences or really keep any more distance from them than at most five feet, if that. They are my greatest possessions and thus my greatest fear, for I can't posses what isn't mine. They are God's, and my awareness of that, which has been extremely heightened by my previous losses, scares me in ways it shouldn't, and in ways that make me feel even more afraid I always will have this fear. I am beginning to fret that no amount of therapy with any person can help me care about losing my mom and dad and my dogs any less.

As for everyone and everything else, I need help. I can't let fear define me and make my decisions, but at least I am aware that's what I'm doing and have been doing. And I have been trying to work on it. It just is even harder than I imagined it would be. And it's hard meeting people when you don't have energy to leave the house, and even if you did, you're wearing a mask the whole time and people stare at you for while wearing it thinking you're contagious when all the while they are the ones who sound like they are hacking up a lung-sized mucus hairball or something. Not exactly the best conversation starter:

"Why are you wearing (they motion toward the mask)?"

"I have a weakened immune system and I can't get sick."

"Oh...ok..." as they give a gentle yet concerned smile and suddenly forget how to form words and sound them out.

THE END

It sucks fearing the inevitable. Especially when you know it's the inevitable.

Impermanence is a blessing and a curse to us humans.

Being loved the same.

Exposing oneself to love, is sometimes nothing more than exposing oneself to pain.

But God does it, and on a scale I...Oh how He loves us!

I don't know how He does it, but I imagine I am here to learn exactly that. So, we drink to Him at this wedding rehearsal we call life, as if naming it means we understand it, and we wait by learning to be brave in love, until our wedding day with our Lord, until our happily ever after, just like in the fairy tales, in the movies. And we'd all do well to ask of ourselves, and of our love for each and every one of His children, and of our love for Him, is it a love without fear, can it be, will we try to make it so, and is it ever enough?

 

Posted with Blogsy