Understanding Fear

I've been facing a lot of fear this year. Epic fear, actually, in every aspect of my life. 

Some of it's logical and understandable. Cancer creates gargantuan fear. Fear of the simplest things, fear of the biggest things. Fear of recurrence. Fear of death. Fear of life. Fear of never being the person you were before your diagnosis. Fear of never being loved. Just... fear.

And tonight, I took a deep look inside of the fear that lives... well... inside.

It started simply. I was thinking about the Filmmaker. I swore I would stop writing about him but he keeps leading me to things so... there you go. He's been posting a lot from a couple of events in Vegas so he's been on my mind. But this really isn't about him. He's just the antagonist, I guess.

Okay, this may be long and rambling so feel free to opt out now. Otherwise, I promise I will get to a point eventually.

 Since I walked away from the Filmmaker, I sometimes get a feeling of almost panic or desperation when I think of him. Some of it makes sense. I miss him. I wish I hadn't walked away from him. I wish we could have worked out. All that kind of stuff that one feels after a break-up. And he was so incredibly specal to me that it's been hard to let him go.

But underneath all of that is this deep-seated, inexplicable panic or fear or... I don't know how to describe it. If I could show you, it would be a reaching, grasping, wanting motion. Buried within that motion is such a deep, dark fear. And that's the fear I'm trying to understand.

In talking with the therapist at the cancer support center I've gone to, she helped me to see that if I can figure out what that grasping, desperate, crazy panic is, I can move past it and maybe really fill that hole that is currently occupied by that fear.

And tonight, as that throat-closing panic began to grow again as I thought about the Filmmaker and all the things I wished he would/could/want him to do, I decided to sit in that ugliness and fear and look deep inside of it.

Like Rose when she looked into the heart of the TARDIS. (Look it up.)

It was hard. I wanted to take the easy answer. It's because I want to be loved and he doesn't love me. I'm disappointed. I'm scared no one will ever love me because if he couldn't, who will? And how will I ever find someone so compatible.... etc., etc., etc. And all the while, I knew none of this was what was causing the panic.

When I pushed all the easy, simple possibilities aside, I finally looked into the fear and started to understand it.

Okay, let's see if I can explain this.

I've spent most of my life being shown that I mean nothing. That I am not important. That I don't deserve to be treated with respect or dignity. That I am not worthy of love of any kind. That I should just stand on the side and wait until I am noticed. I'm not supposed to rock the boat. I'm supposed to just take what I'm given and not expect anything more than that. I am worthless. I am stupid. I am nothing.

I've spent the last six and a half years trying to unlearn that. And I've succeeded in so many areas of my life. And I have come to be more capable of understanding that this is a crock of shit that has been fed to me. None of it intentionally. Well, maybe most of it not intentionally. But I learned it to my soul and I believed it.

And maybe the Filmmaker was the perfect transition and the perfect manifestation of this struggle.

On one hand, he was incredible and everything I wanted. I've struggled for love and struggled to be with someone who I didn't feel I had to change for. When I was with him, I felt safe and easy and perfect. I didn't feel like I was imperfect, even when I went through surgery and chemo and lost all my hair. He made me feel everything I wanted to feel from someone. I felt loved.

On the other hand, he was exactly what I knew, what I had been taught. His inability to acknowledge our relationship to his friends, to his children, made me feel unimportant, not good enough. Made me feel like I was standing on the side, waiting to be good enough for him to want to acknowledge. It made me feel less than and made me feel exactly the way I had felt all my life. It was comfortable. It was familiar.

And the longer we were together, the more I hoped the side of the relationship that was so new and so different from what I knew would grow and become something bigger than the other side. And the harder it became for me to sit with the other side. And the more it hurt that the situation felt so very familiar.

Choosing to walk away from him was the scariest thing I've ever done because it would have been easy to stay. Because it was familiar. Because I knew this.

But the part of me that has grown up through these past almost seven years knew that this familiar, comfortable feeling was not right for me. That if I stayed with him, I would simply end up the way I've always ended up in my life - feeling empty and worthless and numb. Not because he went out of his way to make me feel that way, but because I accepted his inability to acknowledge that we were something more.

And I realized tonight that the panic, the scary, the indescribable thing I feel when I think about him now really has nothing to do with him. It has to do with letting go of the familiar. It has to do with understanding that walking away from him put me in unfamiliar territory. Well, maybe not entirely unfamiliar. I left my ex for almost the same reason - it wasn't right. It was making me fee empty and nothing.

And to face the fact that I deserve more is the scariest thing I've ever felt because I've never felt that I deserve more. It's terrifying for me to acknowledge that I can say I deserve more. Because I have never been taught that I can ask for that. That I can even entertain the idea that I deserve more, when it comes to being loved.

My family did the best they could. My exes both did the best they could. And even the Filmmaker did the best he could.

But I finally accept tonight that I deserve more than the best they could. Because if I acknowledge that and if I say that out loud, then it means something. I don't know what. But it's so very scary for me to say I deserve more and that I want more. Because I see so many people around me who can't say that and who accept less than that I am afraid that it's wrong to say that that's what I want.

And it makes me scared that I will never find what I think I deserve. And I'm scared that I'm asking too much to say that I deserve more. That someone's going to say to me, are you crazy? You don't deserve more. You deserve exactly what you've had.

But tonight, I faced the fear of saying it out loud - I deserve more.

And that means acknowledging that while most of my relationship with the Filmmaker was incredible and amazing and exactly what I wanted, the rest of it made me less than. And I have to let that go in order to move forward to what I deserve. And that's scary because it feels like I can't miss the Filmmaker and that I can't mourn for what could have been. And it makes me want to hang on to him more because it's comfortable to feel that way.

But I have to face the fear and face that I don't want to feel that way anymore. I have to face the fear that I do actually deserve more and that I have to break this one last vestige of my past and really let go. Because once I let go of that awful, terribly, debilitating sense of being nothing, I will be in uncharted territory.Territory that hopefully will lead to something wonderful and amazing and exactly what I deserve. But between here and there, it will be waters full of unknown and fear and clouds and bears and sharks and all kinds of things I don't know. And I have to know that I've faced that unknown before and come out on the other side.

I faced the unknown of leaving my hometown and moving across the country.

I faced almost sixteen years of emotional abuse and walking away from that and rebuilding my life from scratch.

I faced breast cancer.

I can face this. I deserve to face this. And I deserve to accept the love that I want.