Fear II

There’s a chapter in Thin Skin, by Jenn Shapland, where she reflects on the way fear infiltrated her Chicagoan suburban town despite the low crime rates. She felt the fear-mongering was deliberate, a scare tactic to keep the townsfolk away from the city. Reading this chapter, right after writing a blog post about the fear I feel within my own life, struck me as divine timing. The universe reached out to me and told me to grow up.

The threat may or not be real, but the fear is just a construct. “If you worry, you are suffering twice,” an ex-boyfriend once told me. He spoke to remind me that we don’t need fear because we have natural instincts should negative situations arrive. But he caught me at a time when I lacked self-trust — which ultimately led me to break up with him because of compounded worry about the state of our relationship. I am working on self-esteem, I am working on being able to count on myself to respond to situations as they arise, rather than react.

He alluded to worry as a passive waste of time and it took me 4 more years to realize that worry is also a disservice and an insult. When we worry about others, we are palpitating with distrust in their ability to problem-solve.

I’ve been worried about my reliance on substances, but now I’m working through the idea that I will figure out how to manage my desire for distraction. To me, alcohol proves that fear is mentally-construed because I bolden with inebriation. Social anxiety is the first blockage to slip from my awareness when I start drinking, followed by civility, and eventually philophobia. My decisions become as impulsive as they are usually forethought., my manners erode, I’m loose with secrets, and my actions are all navigated towards finding my next drink.

I’ve been trying to get sober for the better part of a year. There have been streaks of success and days of doubt. In the last 2 months I’ve been reading and working through the recovery dharma book. Drinking is only bad for me when I’m using it to feel good. I’m avoiding something else.

I’m attempting sobriety so that I’m forced to discover what it is that I’m not expressing.

Now I’m attempting abstinence from anxiety, because it is a huge waste of time and rude to God.