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Doing the Thing you Fear Most
As a person with Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD), I have had no choice but to learn how to cope with fear. Every few years, there seems there is an adjustment that needs to made, some new thing that emerges, or a fear that dies away, rarely to be remembered again.
As a child, my fears were around medications, disease, and pain. Many years later, I found that they stemmed from a perception of betrayal on behalf of my mother and other adults in my life; those that I trusted most.
This time was followed with one of the two times in my life that I haven’t had any perceivable fears. I went to college far from home and LOVED it. I could eat whatever I wanted for the first time in my life. I could stay out and go dancing. I could be friends with whomever I wanted and date whomever I wanted. Yes, I was at a church school, so it never got wild-by the world’s standards-and that’s okay. I was never a rebellious person anyway.
It all hit again when I got married in the middle of my sophomore year. I had pain, indescribable fears and paranoias, and depression. I was a mess. I had lost my social life, I lived essentially alone with a man who was happy to just have sex without really deserving it. But, what did I know. I was 19.
Things waxed and waned, I left the country to be a nanny, and things got better, almost entirely…
