Fear
“Your power ends where your fear begins.” Not sure who said it first, but it’s a great lyric in a Melissa Etheridge song I love.
Fear drives people to do things. I have a fear of being late for anything. I have tried to figure out the underlying cause of this. I think it is the fear of being alone or fear of missing out. I just don’t know.
Another fear I have is intimacy, emotional, physical and sexual. It explains my lack of a love life and to be honest, my friends not being really close friends, unless they don’t live here. True story. They will say they are close, but I don’t let anyone get a 360 view of me. Now I know what that fear is attributed to. It is that I have a huge fear of abandonment, related back to my childhood. Fear, as I believe Eckhart Tolle said, is rooted in the ego:
“The ego lives in the past and the future but never in the present.”
I fear being late, but that’s in the future. Being present helps that and allowing time; a man made construct; to flow effortlessly through me negates that fear. The ego loses in that case.
The fear of intimacy is a bigger one for me. I so want to not be like anyone else. If anyone gets too attached to me, I may get hurt. I have friends that are movie buffs here in Los Angeles. They know lines from movies and so on. My brain has never been wired that way. It has been wired on emotions from a very young age. Emotions and emotional trauma affects me. My coping mechanisms are affected too. Yet, I don’t want to be like them, but they go to movies all the time. Even when I could afford to go to a movie, I would not go. That said, my tribe is more sports related and has always been. I grew up watching sports from an early age, not movies. My first movie was Footloose to be honest.
Conversely, sports have been my “separation factor”, especially here in Los Angeles where sports knowledge and an affinity to a sports team are almost non-existent. I’ll try to goad a person into a debate on sports here and they don’t take the bait. Yet I want to be different. Yet, I love movies and how they make me feel, how they are constructed, I think of movie ideas all the freaking time. However it is a fear of intimacy and rejection of course that pushes me away from these friends.
Even further, fear is also rooted in my choices with money. I am in this situation because of my own recklessness with money. This is not fun. It is depressing and rooted in shame to be honest. I don’t ask people for help because in doing so, I feel shame. I put myself here, so why ask for others for help? Yet my fear of being broke led me here. To being broke. This is the most uncomfortable place where I have to rely upon others. Yet this is another fear of mine in relying upon others.
The glorious thing about this predicament is that I can’t get a credit card or anything right now to shore up my lack of funds. I am working. I am looking for better employment even though I like my job, but it is expensive to live in LA.
I fear leaving Los Angeles, because I feel I’ll never make it back. As for the money, I am getting to the IDGAF (I don’t give a F) part of worrying about money. That said, I’m not going on a shopping spree. I am almost to the point of laughing at it. Last year I went to an Abraham Hicks seminar. There was a person up on the hot seat. (The hot seat is where they get to talk to Abraham Hicks who is channeled through Esther Hicks.) Anyway, this person was very successful in the reality TV realm. Even I knew who they were but this person lamented about their relationship woes. They said, “I never worry about money, it always comes.” I am just the opposite. I am doing this less and less even though my job is barely paying the rent. (Note: my gut got a bit twisted typing that.) I used to have a life coach who created businesses from scratch and she said the same thing.
Moreover, my wanting to convert a short bus to a home is rooted in 2 things. One; it is to reduce my rent. Yes, the conversion will cost money but afterwards I would be rent-free. Two, it is rooted in fear of intimacy, again. By being on the road all the time, nobody can really get close to me.
One such bus: Robin The Bus on Instagram is pictured below. I love this type of living.
Add to this I have a fear of failure, like most people. I know entrepreneurs who jump off the proverbial cliff and build their wings on the way down. I know them. Einstein said, “I didn’t succeed, I failed 999 times.” Now Nickola Tesla would have something to say about this, but I digress. I am a consensus builder. Even that is rooted in fear. It is fear of others not liking me. See above about emotional intimacy for reference. I am however, a consensus builder but then act upon the decision I made and I own it. Yet, making a decision in a vacuum is hard for me.
Yet, that is the one thing I crave the most, that emotional intimacy with that 1 person and sharing all your thoughts and fears.
Finally, I am reminded of a recurring dream I had as a kid. In the house I grew up in Iowa, we had a basement. The kitchen was long and narrow. As you walked to the end of the kitchen you’d turn left to go down to a landing via stairs. On the right was a door going out to the yard. Take another left and you went down about 7 or 8 stairs to the basement. At the bottom of the basement, the first door on the right was my father’s shop. Tools and things like that were in there. In my dream, I would peer down that second flight of stairs and get sucked into that dark abyss. That’s how the dreams started when I was young, like 8 or 9 years old. As I grew older, I could get to the bottom of the stairs. Finally, by the time the dark abyss sucked me in, I would just laugh at it and then wake up. I was scared mind you but by that time I had figured out the dream and just laughed at it. Needless to say I don’t have those dreams anymore. Our fears in life are like that dark abyss. We get to know them, what they trigger and then start laughing at them. That is my journey.
As I close this, writing this is very intimate and addresses my fear of that. It is not a 360 of me but it is writing what has been in my head for a while and sharing it. I am trying a new method to being a writer by using the Patreon site. Wish me luck and as always, face your fears.
As always, thank you for listening and being a patron of my site. Wish me luck in my endeavors as well.
Much love and peace.