Somebody Please Hit the Pause Button!

Whew. It's been a week since the last post. Sorry.

Life sped up, but it's been good: some part time work at my friend's greenhouse where I can get intensely dirty planting thousands of geranium cuttings, wear old grubby clothing and pretend I'm an organic farmer Brown. Then an intense workshop on the weekend, Fuzzboy has the possibility of a new job that could start VERY soon, and I'm rolling down the hill into the last week --- hopefully, because there's always a possibility it will get cancelled at the last minute --- toward my surgery.

I talked about fear. Well, it's like Fear has been the theme of the week. Not that I'm feeling more fear, it's always been there, as a background noise. Sure, we all have it, it's a normal emotion, but I think I am regularly paralysed by it. Now, I am simply recognizing at a deeper level just how pervasively fear colors my other emotions and my actions. A miasma of fear, oozing out of every pore.

And yet, I feel very positive. I am finally believing the mental health professionals I consult regularly who have been telling me that seeing the fear is a good initial step towards dealing with its pernicious effects. I'm thinking of it as a form of mental pernicious anemia, likely a chronic disease which I inherited from my parents just like I took that recessive gene from each of them for my red hair, or my diabetes. I can't blame them for it any more than I can blame them for the diabetes, or the red hair! ;-) It's heredity, and I'm pretty sure they got it from their parents.

At the same time, I work towards not blaming myself for my fear, and instead concentrate on lessening its grip on my soul. Someone said to me this weekend that just as we can spiral down in an addiction, so can we spiral up: I feel like I hit these brick walls in my life, but maybe they are just small walls that can be detoured around, hurdled, or clambered over with a supportive leg up. When I look back on these walls that filled me with such fear, they honestly look much smaller.

It is normal to fail and to hurt. Then we have to keep going. I heard about a successful artist whose motto is "Fail Faster". It's amazing how infrequently we do fail.