On naming a fear: it's been a while

There has been a fear growing inside me. Based on the blog entries, it's been there for several months. I often referred to it as this feeling, this unknown thing. As with many fears, they are non-specific, general. They grow on ambiguity. If you do not know what you are afraid of, then there is no way to deal with it. The same things in me that make me write: a deep passion and fanciful imagination are the same things that can fuel fear.

For months, I did not know what it was. For the past couple of months, the fear has kept me from blogging, from writing, and in many cases, just simple communication with folks. I knew it was getting bad when an email simply asking me how I was doing would send me into a tears. For a person whose friends claim they do not recall the last time they've seen me cry, I found myself crying quite often. All the while, I kept trying to tell myself that I need to be stronger than this. I was losing myself in this fear, yet I did not know what it was. But I did know that this fear was something deep at my core.

On paper, my life is golden. I have good relationships with friends and family, I have a job, I do things I enjoy, I even had a few poems published, I teach something I love, I'm financially secure. Then why, was I so sad? And why did I feel like I was failing miserably at it? I knew too that if I didn't figure it out soon, I would eventually manifest the failure. I was already not writing, not because I didn't have anything to write about, but because I was losing the desire. I would let poems go. I was losing the worthiness to write.

I wandered around for some time. I thought it was because I was turning 29 and 30 was around the corner. Of maybe it was winter, or the rain, or the hormonal time of the month. One friend thought that it might be that I'm becoming too "safe" in my life, that I should consider moving to an entirely different place.

But none of these answers quelled the fear, they only brought more doubt. What was I doing wrong? What was I missing?

I decided to chat about it with my kali teacher. He's good at pressing for a real answer and always seems to know where to hit you to make it hurt the most. So who better to ask about what was hurting me than someone who knows how to do it?

Our chat looked like him asking Why, What's wrong, what's going on, to each I answered I don't know or no, it's not that. Until he nails it, "oh, drama before all the engagement parties."

"You're not thinking of breaking up, are you?" he gets to the point. I say, "no, I've never even thought of that."

He asks me, "so what's all this nonsense about being afraid of losing each other?" Again, I didn't know. But I feel like it's a question I should find the answer to.

Fear makes the strangest things real. It messes with logic. It expands like a quick rolling fog until you can barely see in front of you much less know which direction you are in.

And he had hit upon what I was fearing. It's one of the three fears we most have around loss/death. Fear of losing someone you love.

Divorce now occurs in more than half of the marriages today. Most of my friends are less than 40 years old, and I can already count a few who have filed those papers. I have watched friends and family go through long relationships even engagements, only to end with someone moving out. I have seen people hang onto relationships that should have ended a long time ago. The fear makes me wonder what breaks these relationships that seemed so solid and I couldn't help but wonder if that could be us. As if the odds were against us.

I know that I'm not leaving this relationship. So, if I'm not leaving, then that fear in me asks what about him. What if I do something to just fuck it up?

As I look back over the past few months, I found that this initial fear has morphed and found its way into other areas of my life, a growing stress upon normal activities.

This is not stuff I had thought of consciously, rather it was coming in on a more gut/instinctual fear. And I wasn't thinking these things because I had seen "signs" in our relationship. If anything, the "signs" said that we have a very strong relationship. Even one friend who is a divorcee said to me, "I may not know how to make a good relationship, but I do know what a bad relationship looks like and yours ain't it."

My family (including the larger extended family) prides itself in having long marriages (ie divorce doesn't happen in my family). Most of my cousins who are married had much shorter relationships before being married. Usually after a few years, or maybe less, they decided to get married. Most of them also wanted to be married by the time they were 30.

The SO and me have been talking about our different fears. It helps to know we have similar fears and letting each other know. We are still on the same page and still want our lives to go in the same direction. It has made us stronger. I know now I don't have to always be the strong one.

Now that I have a name for this fear, I have to go back and pick up the pieces of things that I've neglected. And I can't feel bad about having neglected these things, it just adds another fear.

What can you do? I've got a life to live.