Fear

There is Nothing to Fear.

 As the youngest kid in the neighborhood, I had to come home early from the nightly hide-and-seek game at the community field. It wasn't a long walk, but it seemed like miles to me. One of the neighbor boys would run ahead, jump out, and scare me. Spiderwebs crossed the pathway, invisible in the advancing night. Night sounds became monsters that would come and eat me up.

Barefoot And terrified, I usually ended up at home in tears. My father would soothe me and tell me everything was okay. But he always said these words.

  There is nothing to fear but fear itself.

Those words have stuck in my head for fifty years, and I never truly understood them. Fear was a constant in my life. Raising a son, I was constantly worried that something would happen to him. Even as an adult walking in the night still conjures up memories of sheer terror.

In the recovery community, there are a couple of acronyms for fear.

Fuck Everything And Run, or 

Face Everything And Recover. 

I had to get to the core of fear to stay sober, so I wrote lists of things I fear, talked about my fears, and I even shared my fears with others, all in an attempt to understand this emotion.

I have learned that fear is at the base of all emotions - anger, envy, mistrust, and jealousy, to name a few. 

When I fear a future outcome, I manipulate and control the situation, so my life and the lives of those around me are more manageable, softer, and look right to the outside. And yet, we all go through rough patches. We all have deaths, sicknesses, and financial woes that we deal with in our lives. Accepting these situations, knowing that this is our life lesson, and tuning into the emotions will help us through them. 

If I force my will on others, my anxiety around the situation increases. Anxiety is a spiral back into fear. It becomes a downward circle and will lead me nowhere. How can I believe that I have the right to affect those around me? Everybody is on their guided path in life. If I try to interfere and control it to look safe to me, I am messing with their life path.

Fear is nothing but the desire to make the outcome of situations controllable. Once we realize that the plans for our lives and those around us help us grow, we can then release the fear. 

A friend of mine once said, "I can sit in my emotions, but I will not unpack my bags here."

Fear is just that, fear. Acknowledge it, understand the cause of it and then let it go. 

"It's ruinous for the soul to be anxious about the future and miserable in advance of misery, engulfed by anxiety that the things it desires might remain its own until the very end. For such a soul will never be at rest— by longing for things to come, it will lose the ability to enjoy present things." — Seneca.