Fear and Flight

Fear is not logical, and yet I keep trying to wrestle it into behaving as if it were. I take each fearful thing and examine it from all angles, trying to explain to myself why this particular event, stress, or interaction seems to accumulate associated fears while other things don’t. I track backwards along the paths of fears to see where they come from, in the hope that I can find all the sources and empty them out. Sometimes I succeed. I am not always afraid. Fear absents itself for quite long periods of time. Then I come to a day like today when fear is pervasive, seeping into the most mundane tasks. It is ridiculous to leap from rotten apricots on the ground under our tree to a belief that I will obviously fail at everything I try since I can’t even manage to take care of ripe fruit. I know the leap is ridiculous, but if it is accompanied by a little spike of adrenaline–that fight or flight response–it takes effort to find calmness again.

Then there are the things in my life which are frightening and I can not immediately dismiss as ridiculous, even if I would like to. I booked a plane ticket today. This is my fourth trip for the year, which is more trips in a single year than I have ever had before. I feel a little guilty about that, even more so because I could choose not to take this next trip. I could choose to stay home in my comfortable house with my kids. I could choose calmness and routine. Part of my brain tells me that I should choose those things. Instead I’ll be heading off to a writer’s retreat for an entire week. This is me spending time, resources, and stress in the hope that I will write something saleable. For at least that one week I’ll pull my writing from the edges of my life and put it into the middle. And I’m afraid. I’m afraid that the retreat will show me that I do not have a building career, but instead a nice hobby.

Now that I pull the fear out into the open, it does begin to seem a little silly. After all, there is nothing wrong with hobbies. They are an important source of joy and life satisfaction. It would not be a disaster to have writing as a hobby. So if writing as a hobby is not disastrous, why then am I afraid? What if I made the wrong choice in going to the retreat? What if something terrible happens while I am gone? What if I’ve wasted all my time? A hundred other what ifs file through my brain and I begin to see that a large portion of the fear is simply ambient to the day rather than created by the decision. Then I sigh and put away all my thoughts. I’ll look at them again some other day to see if they look different.