Dear Cruzzie:

Thank you, I do like “the wise one”, brings a smile to my face as I type this.

You wrote: “I’m just scared. I don’t know how else to describe this”- this is as honest a statement as can be. I am scared too. I’ve been scared since I was a child and that is fifty years of scared. Being scared is the most unpleasant, most uncomfortable feeling I know. I tried to avoid it any way possible. I resisted it any which way I could, automatically, from restricting my inhaling and exhaling, holding my breath (still doing it), to performing simple and elaborate OCD rituals to neutralize it (way less now), to over-eating, over-dieting, over exercising, over- over… rushing, distracting any which way. My many tics, over a lifetime (Tourette Syndrome) is my muscles rushing, rushing to escape this experience of fear.

And yet, I did not escape fear. Unfortunately, it seems more and more that indeed there is no way over it but through it. I am still resisting it as I type this, still holding my breath. At times I am calm, but with physical discomfort, challenges, worries about other people, there is the fear again.

Oh, I do wish I could say that I mastered fear. I wish it was so. But it is not.

I wrote that it seems that there is no way over it but through it. “It seems” because I am still afraid, so how do I know if there is a way at all to be over it. We don’t know what we didn’t yet experience, over time.

There is nothing, I believe, that you can read, or that I can read, that will take fear away. I have faith that through a process, one I already started, one you did as well, we can stop being so afraid of feeling afraid.

It is a personal process, highly personal. Nothing will convince me that I can stop being afraid, or as afraid, except for my own tangible, core experience. To get that experience, I have to experience it.

I hope you post again. This is an amazingly relevant thread for me.

anita