Someone asked me, not terribly long ago, if I was afraid of anything. There was exactly one thing that I could think of: needles. I am and will always be terrified of them. Other than this, I was not afraid of anything. Everything in my life was going well, what was there to fear?
As a child, I was afraid of everything. I couldn’t sleep at night because I thought I would sleep to soundly and not hear the smoke detector go off when my house inevitably caught on fire. I refused to go into haunted houses because it seemed like a really good hiding place for a kidnapper and serial killer to seek out new victims. I hated playing in my basement because of a plethora of fears, not limited to: spiders, the furnace, and anything else that could be lurking in the darkness.
At some point on the path to becoming an adult, I stopped being afraid of anything at all (except needles, of course). Somehow, over the course of the last couple of years, I became afraid again. It has not been an easy few years, the hardest in my life to date. I am just not sure at what point fear crept its way back into my life, or why. Perhaps, when life becomes unbearable, you start to worry about all of the ways it can get worse. But it is the anxiety that makes it all so difficult. Life is not that bad, it is worrying about future troubles that makes it overwhelming.
So, why worry about things that may or may not happen in the future? Or better yet, things you cannot control? I try to just stop subscribing to fear, but it is easier said than done. I don’t have any major insight to this, maybe once I pull myself back out of this I can share some wisdom. Right now I am just sending out more questions, in hopes that insight will come either through writing this all down or through someone stumbling upon this and respond with the answers.
The Adventures of Brittany Kay 