wednesday afternoon

hi. today is wednesday and i am home this afternoon because my son has a fever. i didnt expect to be home today either which is always a weird thing for me. when i end up at home unexpectedly. my son is asleep now. thought i'd take this opportunity to write in the afternoon. it is really sunny outside today and beautiful. it always strikes me when it is really nice out and my children are sick--like the universe should not be allowed to create such beauty when my child is sick. feels like it should rain until they get better. then i think about how so many people experience pain, tragedy, loss on sunny days and it freaks me out. really freaks me out.

last night at a meeting i was talking (again) about my hypervigilance when it comes to worrying about things that could happen. i was explaining that i have this character defect where i can worry about every possible angle of a situation and that somehow this worrying or processing or analyzing is comfortable for me. it protects me from my great fear which is that something bad will happen that i wont see coming. i talked about how it is really silly since nearly everything bad that has ever happened to me or anyone i know--i did not see coming at all. to think that i somehow can protect myself from the pain and suffering of life just by imagining what might happen is absurd. stopping doing it is really hard though.

so last night this lady approaches me after the meeting and says she does the samething and that we need to look at what feeling we're escaping while we imagine. truth, when you hear it, is always so recognizable. she hit the bulls eye. my fearful imaginings are a convenient pathway straight out of my reality --which currently is a move that i am terrified of, leaving a job i like and am good at, and a new town where i dont know anyone that well. i know, i know there are tons of good things too but my fear is real and when i ignore it it just finds crazy ways of manifesting itself anyway--in this case in my imagining other scary things to worry about instead of feeling my fear that is real today and just accepting it. moving is scary because the unknown (even the good unknown) means leaving behind the known.


so, i am sitting here writing. trying to accept my fear and also trying not to add fuel to the fire by imagining my child may have the worst of all possible illnesses or that my husband will never come home bc of some freak car accident. to some this all my sound insane. to me, this is a place i frequently visit. the place in my head that tells me that i have to be ready all of the time for something to fall apart. the place that tells me that life is scary, hard, and not to be trusted to be your friend.

i know now why i do this and sometimes i can stop myself from doing it but i will say that somewhere deep inside me there is a belief that i am not wrong. i want to challenge that belief and i do, but it remains. i think that belief grew inside me at some critical time and is now stuck there forever. i hope this is not the case. i want to move on past the fear. want to learn to be present even when things hurt or are scary. it takes courage though to do all of this. it takes strength to tell the truth--to be ourselves, real, hoping, believing...waiting to see what happens next. where this is all going. how it will all turn out. there is no rewind, no pause, no fast forward. there is only this here. me, writing, trying to do better. all of us, trying to do better. xx