living in fear = not save

thanks to discussions with my friend lizzie, I have had some new realizations.

i had known of my dad’s anger and displeasure toward me and my siblings actions. i wanted to avoid those at any cost. i came to know that as flying under the radar. if i could fly under the radar, i could avoid the wrath of dad. this was a continuous and exhausting struggle. those times i would do something wrong, no matter how small, I’d pop up on the radar and be in fear of what ever retribution would come my way. It was never a lesson except through retribution.

how is this fear any different than the fear the wild rabbit feels, afraid of the next time they are to be chased by a wolf or coyote, with in inches of their life? in both instances, there is this living in fear of something that may or may not happen. with this constant fear, the adrenal gland constantly works over time. that’s hard on the body.

all of this came into focus from a simple and obvious statement; living in fear = not safe. it is so obvious, i had never realized it before.

the above and more comes cascading out of that statement. i had this vision of a somewhat idyllic childhood. Sure, i had my struggles, among them my dysfunctional family and the gifts that came from that, but leaving childhood i felt somewhat well adjusted. Also, so does the rabbit but still, when they hear a branch break at 50 feet, their hair trigger response tells them to run.

on this statement alone, living in fear = not safe, causes the crystalline structure of my supposed idyllic childhood to come crashing down. i now sit in the broken shards, in full recognition of my early childhood along with some of the outcomes because of it. i, like the rabbit developed to hair trigger response to run. why run? because i like the bunny, don’t feel save.

sitting in the shards, an answer to a long standing question comes into focus, “how with this supposed idyllic childhood, do i face such emotional and depressive struggles?” the answer comes clear; there was no idyllic childhood. i now have a better understanding of the reasons for the lack of foundation that i hoped would serve as a basis of handling life’s struggles.

will i ever feel safe again? likely not. the early childhood’s experience are pretty difficult to overcome. even if i could, there still exists this safety robbing fear is part of just about any higher life form. even with that, thanks to you and my friends around me, i can learn ways to handle it and hopefully make for a better life. is failure inevitable? sometimes. i will close with a self authored meme, “failure doesn’t make me less of a human…it only makes me human.”

dental crash

i have a long and not so illustrious history with the field of dentistry. the first dentist would drill through the pain. The second believed in shame based dentistry. The third was my only saving grace. The fourth ripped the dental damn out of my mouth with the look of frustration on his face because i was unable communicate through the damn with a partial numb tongue.

1 for 4, that barely keeps me in the big leagues. hopefully, that explains while it has been twenty years since i last saw a dentist.

coming to terms with the thing that imprison me

have you ever noticed the spinning cycles of depression which seem to be there whether in cycle or not? I surely have.

sadness leads to sadness which leads to even more sadness. sadness seems to become an all encompassing self-fulfilling struggle.

fear leads to fear which leads to even more fear. fear seems to become an all encompassing self-fulfilling struggle.

living with a discombobulated mind

i don’t know about you, but i consider my list of close friends to be small; easily fitting on one hand or less than one finger, depending on how tight i make my definition. there has been a considerable development this past week and i need to talk.

the anxiety battle

my friend has had a near life–long battle with anxiety. now her daughter, who is about 8, faces a continual struggle with anxiety. she was looking for some ideas so i passed along some that would hopefully be helpful to her and her daughter. i realize that i could also benefit from the “medicine” i gave her. my hope is it might help you, too.

my office-my mind

this a picture of my office.

how’d it get like this? years of work. There are a number of contributing factors

disorganized/not enough space – i go to put something away and i don’t know what to do with it. if it doesn’t have a place, i’ll just set in down and commit to getting to it later. later never comes.

a dumping grounds- Mary ask me to take care of a pile of stuff. i have no place for it and i am generally not in the mood to make a decision or there is no place for the thing, so i just stow it away in my office.

a mess begets a mess- The room became a mess. I have something to put away. it may even have a place to go where is make some sense. i enter the office. let’s see, if i step over this pile to step over that pile to step over another pile to step over yet another pile, i could put it away. nah, that’s too much effort, i’ll just drop it here.

computer archaeology- did you know the computers and their peripherals get old and outdated? technology which use to work perfectly fine, won’t even hook up to modern day computers. i guess i hold onto it in case there is an emp. perhaps, the older technology will still work. i have a mac plus, with a full mb of memory! it booted at one time. does it boot today? i don’t know. even if it could boot, it would take quite the convoluted procedure to get the data from that machine to a modern machine. The shortest path would be:

1. load the data to a floppy.
2.  find a newer computer, which i don’t have, that still has a floppy but with ethernet capabilities. network it to an even newer computer, which i don’t have.
3. make sure it has the right version of network software and i could finally transfer it to my current machine.

see, only three step. though, my syquest drive that would work on the mac plus was a massive 40 mb or storage. knowing my computer usage at the time, only a small portion of that would be dedicated to data. furthermore, does anyone remember wordperfect? i do. its file format is convoluted which makes it hard to even easily copy the text out of a raw text file. their formatting was inline. if i haven’t looked at it in two decades, how important is the data, anyway?

the office suffers from two main problems:

1. i hold on to stuff, thinking, hoping it will be useful to me or someone else at some further date. This goes beyond the office.
2. i don’t have a clue of what to do with whatever is in my hands. the anxiety builds quickly. the only way to escape it, is to get what ever out of my hands. it gets added to the pile of unknowns.

If you remember advanced algebra at all, and equation of so many unknowns needs at least that many equations to solve for the unknowns. the pile contains a lot of unknowns and will require many more equations just to solve it.

of course the analogy between my office and my mind, are frighteningly similar.

1.  i keep hold of stuff, hoping that those thoughts or experiences might help me or someone else some time in the future. most of the time, they just weigh me down.
2. I have something in my life that i have no clue how to handle. i find my pile and add it there. slowly the anxiety abates but the residual remains. perhaps, adding it to the pile is a good short term solution, but not so for the long term.

where do i go from here? first, what has writing this done to me? as i wrote this i could begin to feel the anxiety build. the anxiety has increased to such a level that a knot of fear has taken up residence in my pit of my stomach.

fear? what fear? three rear the ugly heads; the fear that i’ll get rid of something i’ll need next week, the fear i won’t do it perfectly (perfectionism on a pile of stuff, jees), and the fear that like so many times before, i would not be able to complete it (fear of failure). enumerated the fears only made the knot a little tighter.

i guess i’ll make the decision to move forward like george mallory did and attempt to climb my mountain. hopefully my outcome ends up a little better than mallory’s. mr. mallory attempted his summit of mt. everest in 1929. evidence found in 1999, the photos on his camera, show he succeeded in summiting his mountain. unfortunately, he succumbed to the brutal conditions on his descent.

r*e*s*p*e*c*t

i don’t care about what you think about me, but i do care how you treat me.

a friend of mine shared this mantra with me. with the sound of Aretha franklin echoing in my head, i thought about the saying, i realized the i do care how you treat me part represents a statement of respect and/or compassion. secondly, I realized how most people with social anxiety, at least at some level, struggle with respect.

a nightmare averted, the power lingers

I found myself in a dream state this morning. in the dream, i checked my email in the early morning hours. a new email pops up in my inbox. it came from my primary bank. it has the customary title of,”your password has changed. please contact us if you did not make this change”

and, i didn’t change it!

if

if a picture paints a thousand words

then why can’t i paint you?

the words will never show

the you i’ve come to know…

bread

if i could only write to you

what word would choose to use?

to express the pain i feel

being so misconstrued

me

my self-care struggle defined

self care struggle—pain

another anxiety

lurks around corners

recently, followers have read about self care struggle and self care struggle-part deux. they had a common theme of self care seemingly going well and as planned yet the results were as if an emotional mine had gone off leaving emotional parts of me here and there.