Everything New Over the Moon
I used to be very fearful... Everything had the potential to terrify me, and throw me out of kilter. I am straining my memory now but can’t quite filter out the dates or points at which my perspective shifted, because I did not start out afraid... I have been told by family and clan that I was “the most extroverted” baby they had ever seen. This lasted into toddlerhood; a bit after. Apparently the impression was cemented by an apparent lack of inhibitions in my actions. I had at the time no compunction about breaking out into song and dance in the middle of PathMark in Michael Jackson style to explain some moves to any deprived folks who claimed they “didn’t know how...”
Was it the moonwalk? really, I don’t remember at the moment, but the idea makes me laugh; though others remain sad in recollecting this, apparently missing some unharnessed happiness they thought they witnessed. Where did it go? someone inevitably asks... and I suppose I can psycho analyze... and see how incrementally I became terrified... of living.
In a strange twist, my fear manifested within a few years in the diametrically opposite direction of my early showboating. It was about the age of 6-7 (significant, but let’s not jump to conclusions). I’m convinced school had only slight influence. Without getting into details, the problems were much closer to home. Whatever the cause, the fear that developed was one of “being alone,” a particular variety which at the time I could not adequately articulate. By middle school I had enough self-awareness to begin to characterize the problem, and from this distance I can clearly summarize that I was not afraid of being “by myself” ...as anyone having experienced similar anxiety can attest. I was afraid of being alone—like in a crowded theater. I mean this of course metaphorically. The fear itself was, as it always is, of the Unknown; in this instance it just happened to take the form of the impersonal “Stranger.” Single or plural.... It could be easily diverted to anything... the dark, heights, spiders...
I have come to understand, in observing worse struggles in others, that the object doesn’t much matter in questions of trust... and fear and distrust do go hand in hand. What is it that makes the heart and mind race, and go on to chase memories in redundant carnival loops; or to take preemptive leaps toward tomorrow with a readied dagger? At some point it became painfully clear: I did not trust Myself!!!! And so I feared every situation... because.... How would I respond? ...Would it be alright? ...Would I say or do something wrong? ...Would I offend someone?
This very real phantom has a way of completely immobilizing the spirit and twisting the outlook into something presumed to be shy. When I became aware of this serious self-incriminating charge, sometime late in college, I was finally (after a while longer) released from my own prison of Mistrust. I gradually stopped allowing outside circumstances to rule over my attention; I stopped scripting a multiplication table of what if’s? I will confide that when I lost my anxiety I actually cried... yes there was a precise moment of recognition of loss... in a way in letting go of the pain and discomfort, I was regretting a lessening of “sensitivity,” which wasn’t exactly accurate... letting go of the fretting over the unknown past and future actually allowed me to finally be in tune with individuals and surroundings in the present at any given second. At this point, I suppose I knew my reactions better, but also I had determined above all to be able to Trust myself... finally, fundamentally, by necessity... because at every moment, we really are (after all) alone with just our fragmented self on a very crowded Earth... and it is a truism, that you cannot trust others if you do not trust yourself.