The Fearful Me

There is a season for everything. A time to build and a time to tear down, sort of thing.

There are times to be fearless, to see nothing in the earth that could harm you. There are times to be fearful, but brave and steadfast against them.

But now, here, seems as good a time as any to feel afraid, not that I have a choice. Not that I like it. I don't.

Little strange fears flutter through me. Some of them don't make sense. Others are as clear and true as anything I've seen when walking in the world. They brush the murky depths of me, and wake deeper fears, long thought forgotten by me, that stir, and rear their awful heads again to torment me.

I'm afraid of many things. Physical things, injury, ravaging illness, savage animals, the violence of people against me. Mental things, madness, the uncertainty of mortality, abandonment, embarrassment, loneliness, poverty. Other things, harder to easily define, or even describe: dark feelings, sudden stares from strangers, the coldness in blackness, that which is unknown, the knowledge that changes you forever, innocence drifting away and the puppet-master pulling strings.

As always, I have no weapons in my fantasies, sometimes I cannot even run, or close my eyes. Only watch, while I am maimed, slain, broken, beaten, humiliated, mutilated, isolated and segregated. Over. And over. And over.

I understand that fear has a purpose: This, you must avoid. Fear is a warning.
But this torture I impose on myself, when I lie here, what use is it? What point is there to this? Why can't I stop?

When I sleep my dreams reflect my conscious thoughts. Weird nameless terror chases me, and I wake up as restless as I was when I laid down my head.

Fear is so close, always. Everyday The people love could be destroyed in freak accidents, every day I could be diagnosed with a disfiguring cancer, everyday could bring some new horror, ready to tear away everything I have.

There is nothing so weak, I think, than a creature imprisoned by it's own self. I think that is what I have become.

I have tactics for fighting the things that go wrong with me, adapt and so on. Cope and keep going. But there is no defense against this ever-ready paranoia. None at all.