Browsing Tag

fear

Guest Posts, Fear, Illness

The Rainbow Laundry Project

November 6, 2016

By Alison Moncrieff

It was a week I thought I’d have alone in our house, but camp plans fell through for my boy and my girl was home with a  cold. It was mid-August, hot and dry, and my children, decidedly not at camp or elsewhere, bounced off the walls like a couple of Superballs, like Boing Putty or Bouncy Clay. After bouncing, they dug holes in the back yard, filling them with water they diverted through aqueducts they made from PVC pipe. They experimented wildly with staples and spices, inventing power-food recipes for rainbow2imaginary creatures with the ability to fly and heal. They had healing, escaping death even, on their minds. They painted in acrylics on the walls of their bedrooms. (Yes, I said it was okay!)

We were nearing the end of the week. I was anxious, short-fused. Come September, I’d be having brain surgery to remove a benign but growing tumor from my right frontal lobe, and I was preoccupied with that. More like terrified. I was only just getting my bearings since my mom died the year before, and the thought of brain surgery was daunting even before I remembered I’d have to go through it without her. And what if I died? This was the level of my fear. I tried to counter it with positive facts about the good odds of my survival and how brain surgeons really know what they are doing, etc.  Those things didn’t exactly calm me down. When I told my kids about the surgery, my daughter (5) asked first about the details of the operation (“How do they get in there to take it out?”), then she asked if I was going to die. My son (8) sat close in with wide eyes. I stayed upbeat. I trotted out the positive facts about the good odds and capable surgeons, and I told them about Egyptians doing brain surgery thousands of years ago. I considered that I was lucky to be able to give them the answer I did. Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, Fear, Illness

Embracing Imperfection

November 4, 2016
hug

By Meg Pier

“If you have special circumstances, please tell us,” announced a sign at the registration table.

I felt a combination of relief and skepticism, an internal tug of war between hope I’d get what I came for–and certainty I wouldn’t.

“I’m sure everyone thinks their circumstances are special,” I babbled to the attendants. “But my mother is dying and things aren’t finished between us. I got here late but it wasn’t my fault. I really, really need a hug.

And I wanted it from no less than someone considered by millions to be a divine mother.

Hindu spiritual leader Mata Amritanandamayi is also known to her followers as “Amma,” or “Mother” in the Indian dialect of her native Kerala. Amma’s ministry is hugging people, which she considers a manifestation of her darshana, or divine vision. Through a series of world tours over the past three decades, the rotund guru has embraced more than 36 million people—roughly the same number of people who have seen the Rolling Stones in that time period.

When I had happened to hear that the mystic would be practically in my back yard in a few days, I thought, “What the hell.” As a lapsed Catholic who was struggling to believe in anything, I needed whatever help I could get.

My mother had been diagnosed with a recurrence of cancer that had claimed half of one of her lungs five years earlier. I loved my mother deeply but her frequent brushes with death had left me so exhausted, addled and angry that at times I felt about to spontaneously combust. Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, courage

Change is supposed to be good, right?

November 3, 2016
change

By Lisbeth Welsh

If you want something to change, then you have to make a change.  And that’s what I did.  I made a massive change, uprooting my life from Las Vegas and returning to LA.  After almost 2 years in the neon desert, I (thought) I was ready to return to my beloved Southern California.  To be back near the ocean and the beach and away from the blistering heat and soul-less sin city.  And so I moved.

I am fortunate that I currently have a job that I can do anywhere so there was no big new job to pin it on, no date of any relevance just a lull in my schedule that gave me an opportunity to pack up me and my dog and reposition us back ‘home’.  But coming home has not been so easy.  My friends and sense of community are here but my family, are not.  They’re still thousands of miles away in the UK.  My prior home, is managed by a rental company who have out priced me in my rental budget since I left.  So, not for the first time in my life I’ve had to pick myself up like a random little pin and drop myself in the middle of a map and begin to rebuild and reboot my life. Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, Fear, parenting

The Ride

September 19, 2016
fears

By Tanya Mozias Slavin

He went on that ride with his Dad. At first I was sure he wouldn’t go. I stood behind the fence and watched them get seated and strapped in, watched the guard lower the safety restraint on them for extra security.

Oh how I hate roller coasters. I hate them precisely because you’re supposed to love them. Because every time I admit to myself that I hate them I get this nagging feeling of inadequacy in my stomach, as if some cheerful somebody is about to come over to me any moment, cheerfully grab my hand and pull me with her saying in the most caring cheerful determined and supportive voice you can imagine ‘Come on! You are gonna have fun!’ And will maybe add ‘Don’t be scared!’ And to the sound of lazy applaud of those still waiting their turn to ride, I would drag after her feeling clumsy and non-fun and somewhat guilty for being a burden – because surely she can be simply having fun but instead she had decided to take care of me – but totally unable to say, even to myself in my head ‘LEAVE ME ALONE I DON’T FUCKING WANNA HAVE FUN!’ What’s the problem to just let a person be! Maybe they are having fun standing there and watching other people hanging upside down in the air and dangling their limbs like little helpless insects!

But I digress. All I wanted to say was that I was sure Martin wouldn’t want to go on that roller coaster ride. Because he is just such a cautious boy and he really doesn’t like speed or any other kind of adrenaline inducing activities. I mean he even hated slides until he was almost four years old. And I’m NOT the one to cheerfully grab his hand and pull him towards whatever he is scared of. Because SEE ABOVE. In fact, that was the silent promise I made to myself the minute the mere possibility of motherhood appeared in front of me in the form of a little plus sign on a pee stick: NO CHEERFUL HAND GRABBING. He is allowed to be whatever he is and I will never be the one to coerce him, in however subtle and positive way, to be what he is not.

And yet, as I was standing there watching him take the seat beside his Dad, and with this focused but calm expression on his face raise into the air for his first ever roller coaster ride, I couldn’t keep wondering: was I unintentionally enabling his fears all this time? Was I, in my desire to give his fears space and validate them, inadvertently helping them to be stronger than they needed to be? I didn’t think I was. Yes, I offered him to hide behind me if there was a dog coming toward us and I felt him getting tense, because I didn’t want him to jump onto the road in fear. Yes I never insisted on him getting even his toe in the swimming pool when he was scared of the water. But I also made sure he spend enough time around dogs and swimming pools, and always said things like ‘When you are ready, you’ll be able to do it’. I had never been an overprotective parent. But maybe I wasn’t doing enough to help him be ready? Did he just need a little nudge in the right direction? Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, Fear, Gratitude

WHAT COULD HAVE HAPPENED

August 13, 2016
running

By Kate Abbott

I didn’t know it at the time, but my writing was born on the night I nearly died.   Maybe born is too strong a word but let’s just say I was incentivized by the horror.  Not the horror of what actually happened, but by what could have happened.

I am an ordinary mother.  I don’t suffer from any health issues, well except for my obsession with running, and my kids, thankfully, are well adjusted, at least most days.  I try my best to make my sons’ lives extraordinary and normal at the same time.

It started with a fifth grade science fair project.  After procrastinating to the last possible moment, my eldest came up with his concept: sleep deprivation.  He planned to keep his father up all night and take notes on whether there were hallucinations.   The only wrinkle: dad was out of the country until after the project was due.   No matter, I told my son, mom can step in.  I had an ulterior motive.   In a moment of madness known to afflict runners during post-race bliss, I had signed up for a 100 mile race.   This necessarily meant that I would be running, or if not running at least hopefully moving forward, for probably 36 hours.   An overnight training run was strongly recommended.

And that was why I was outside in the rain as Friday night turned into Saturday morning.  I was doing various loops around the neighborhood, checking in every 45 minutes to have my mental status assessed by my son, who was playing video games.  The idea was to compare the effects of sleep deprivation on a subject who was engaging in physical exercise with that of one who was engaging in a mental activity.   He’d compiled a list of math problems that we would do. Continue Reading…

courage, Guest Posts, Vulnerability

Bang Bang, Shoot Shoot

February 15, 2016

By Stephanie Couey

When I hold it, it feels nothing like a cock.  Not even a hint of cock in this piece of heavy black metal; a symbolism I had imagined would be solid and indisputable goes limp as I hold the grip with my palms, resting my fingers along the barrel.  As I hold it before firing, all I can think of, is unveiled violence, and how it doesn’t, at any moment, not even as the gun goes off and hits the target I’m aiming for, feel anything like power.

My partner, hopefully the last person I have to love, and I pull up into the parking lot of the shooting range with a plastic Wal Mart bag full of doughnuts and energy drinks.  He says something to me about this place being ripe with material, just as I’m thinking the same thing.  I feel myself slip into the role of slimy anthropologist, knowing I’m sure to get my fill of white right wing men to observe like animals.

The parking lot in Fort Collins, Colorado is unsurprisingly full of utility trucks and oversized family vehicles.  As we walk into the front room of the range, he emphasizes how important it is that it not be called a “shooting range” but a “gun club.”  He tells me this is a place where people go to find a community outside of their homes or jobs, not just to shoot guns.

If I can respect anything, it’s the need for establishing community, but I wonder if I can keep myself out of the way enough to be able to see the community, and not just see my own opinions mirrored back to me in a mosaic whose patterns I think I already know.  In the patterns, I’d see a row of men, shooting just after the Sunday morning service, gripping their loaded second cocks, discharging projectiles one after the other toward pieces of cardboard they envision to be terrorists, homosexuals, atheist academics, sexual deviants courting their daughters, or some amalgamation of all of them, and I could be right, but I could also not be. Continue Reading…

anti-bullying, Guest Posts

Sitting on the Same Side

February 8, 2016
bravery

By Beth Bornstein Dunnington

A disturbing thing happened at dinner the other night in one of my favorite restaurants in Hawaii. I was with my closest friend, and we hadn’t seen each other in a month because I’d been traveling. We had a lot to talk about and the table we were at (a table for two in the corner) was big, and we were too far away from each other. So I moved over to her side, a bench against the wall, to sit next to her… we had our heads together and were hunkered down in a deep conversation… and a fifty-something man with a big square jaw at the table next to us, who was there with two women and a baby, took offense to us sitting together like that and ordered me to go back to my side of the table.

It was shocking. Completely out of the blue.

He actually said, “You two have no class!” and “Go back to your fucking side, that’s why they HAVE two fucking sides!” There was so much background noise no one working at the restaurant heard what was going on, and we were on our own.

I did NOT go back to my seat on the other side of the table and it looked like a blood vessel was going to burst in his forehead, he was so enraged. I looked him in the eye and was not afraid, as crazy as this situation was. I stood my ground. I realized he must have thought we were a gay couple and that this was a small taste of what homophobia feels like. It blew my mind… really caught me off-guard. Continue Reading…

Fear, Guest Posts

On The Edge Of The Void

January 22, 2016

By Tanya Slavin

Martin stands at the edge of a swimming pool, nervously shifting from one foot to the other, his whimpering becoming full blown crying the longer he stands there. I am waiting for him in the water, my arms invitingly outstretched, ready to help him in whenever he’s ready. I’m not pressuring him to go in, but the whole situation is: most of the other 4 year olds at this birthday party have been splashing happily in the water for a quite a while now, their happy babbling at stark contrast with his nervous wails. Some are already out of the water, getting ready to go upstairs to the birthday boy’s apartment for birthday cake and more fun.

Martin isn’t scared of the water. I take him to our local YMCA kids’ pool regularly where we splash and play happily. But the big difference is that the water in that familiar pool starts ankle deep, so he can move gradually, at his own pace, into deeper water, or stay at ankle depth if he chooses to. In this pool in our apartment building, the water starts waist-deep right away for someone his height. The other kids don’t care, but Martin isn’t comfortable plunging into that depth right away, so he stands there on the edge, scared and screaming.

I keep my hands outstretched and my voice positive and encouraging, when a sudden flashback obscures my cheerful attitude. In this recurrent nightmare of mine, I’m small and standing alone on the edge of a void that is formed by several missing steps in a stairway of my school building. Everybody else (all my classmates, teachers, my parents) have jumped over the void without giving it a second thought, and are happily on the other side, now encouraging me to jump over, their cheering voices ensuring me that it’s not that hard. But I am completely paralyzed by fear, and my knees begin to shake every time I try to make a step forward. I am certain that if I try to jump, I will fall into the void. So I’m standing there frozen and not jumping even though I desperately want to be on the other side with everybody else.

Alone, on the edge of the void, is where I spent my entire childhood. There was always ‘that side’ and ‘this side’, and a huge void in between. On that side were clowns and bouncy castles, noisy parties and dancing, being good at sports and being updated on the latest pop music, make up and girl nights out. ‘This side’ housed a comfy chair and a pile of books, being too sensitive and crying too much, and being scared of heights and elevators. It was understood and clearly confirmed to me by every trusted person in my life that ‘that side’ was the right one, and if you weren’t already there, you were expected to try hard to jump over. Continue Reading…

courage, Guest Posts, healing, Letting Go

Mama are you good at sports?

December 21, 2015

By Gina Sorell

“Mama are you good at sports?”

It’s a question said with a sweet mischievous smile, by my 4-year-old son. It’s the first days of spring and we are standing in a sunbeam in the backyard in the tall grass that has somehow managed to come back to life, just like us, after a winter spent under snow. I’m failing hilariously at catching the balls he throws me. This is our joke. He knows the answer is no, and when I say it, we both burst out laughing. I love watching him laugh, and even more I love that he knows that there is something I am not good at. I want him to know that not everybody is good at everything, or the same things, but they should try them anyway, and if they want to be good, they need to practice. It’s a lesson I needed to teach him early on as he seems to have inherited my same perfectionist tendencies, getting upset with himself if he can’t master something right away. I know this feeling. I danced for many years and perfectionism of all types was encouraged. After he laughs, I often follow up by saying, “I’m not good at sports, but mama can dance!” And then bust out my best Martha-Graham-meets-90’s-New-Wave-dance moves in a circle around him. See, everyone is good at something I am hoping to show him, with my flailing limbs, and now creaky knees that are happier bobbing side to side than up and down, and he often joins in.

But one day he changes up our routine and asks me with all sincerity, “But why? Why aren’t you good at sports?”

It’s a simple question that leaves me speechless. What do I tell him? The reason I wasn’t any good at sports, was because instead of being taught to practice, I’d been taught to be afraid. Sports was where a ball could break my face, smash my nose, knock my teeth out. It was that place where my widely accepted clumsiness, would be my downfall, a clumsiness that somehow didn’t apply to my passion or ability for modern, jazz, ballet and national dance.

“Um, I guess I just didn’t practice very much. But I did do other things, like dance.”

“And baseball?” Continue Reading…

Beating Fear with a Stick, courage, Fear, Guest Posts

Footsteps Follow: The Fear Came With Silence

December 13, 2015

Trigger Warning: This essay discusses the experience of having a stalker.

By Bianca Palumbo

Outsiders – they just don’t seem to understand.  I have been tiptoeing my way around for months, on edge.  I am experiencing something I wouldn’t wish upon my worst enemy. I have been followed, disturbed, and thrown off-guard by a man known only as my stalker.

It all started the year I was graduating from High School, 2014.  I was always actively pursuing new opportunities and working every event that I could.  What I never expected was the possibility of meeting a stranger who would someday haunt me.  No young woman can prepare for the endless nights of fear and unknowing that come in reaction to a stalker.

I have been independent for most of my life. I wanted to work whenever I could, joined clubs and sports teams, volunteered in the community, and that all excelled the day I earned by driver’s license.  It was the summer I was leaving for college that the first email came through.  My stalker had crafted a story about our romantic relationship and all of the bonds we have shared together. Meanwhile, I had no idea who he was.  I only realized where we met when he admitted to finding my information in a staffing email.  This was the first real time my privacy was violated – I felt I could trust no one.

I thought he would go away; thought it would all end on its own, but I was wrong.  For two years he has been sending me stories about our relationship.  His infatuation has become dangerous and I have become a victim to the act of harassment and stalking.  I no longer work too far from home and am nervous going anywhere alone.  My independence has been quickly taken away and I rely on others for personal safety. But, many people underestimate the situation throw my worries to the backburner.  The police and the judge questioned my reasoning to the point where I felt betrayed.  After endless explanations and pleas, it was hard evidence that turned the law around. Continue Reading…