Fear Purge Begins...

Feel free to run. It's long and I won't mind. I wrote it more for me than for you. If that makes sense...

I knew that undertaking something scary to me would trigger this. A fear purge, if you will. I mean, it happens to the best of us. We have our secret fears and we either address them and move on or we tamp them down and every once in a while they go all rogue and rise up like some George Romero zombie.

My fear purge has begun.

This new project is not my normal schtick. It doesn't come easy to me but I'm capable of it. However, I'm fearful of it. Which is why I've always talked about this project but never done it. It was so much easier to write my fun, sexy books/stories that came easy to me. It was easy to operate in my comfort zone. My niche. My cozy little cave with all my favorite people gathered around me. I liked it.

Now here I am. Standing out in this big open field and I don't know the danger zones. I don't know where is safe and where it's not. I don't know where there might be a rabbit hole for me to twist my ankle in or an angry snake coiled in some high grass. Killer bees, lightning storms, hungry jackals. Anything is possible.

So the fear purge has begun and I'm buckled in. I've spend the last 34 years filling the emotional equivalent of a sucking chest wound with stuff. The stuff varied. When I was way young in my early to late teens it was sex, danger and stupid stunts. See, I thought for sure I was checking out early like my dad had. I think seeing your father in a box at an early age kind of dents you. It might be the kind of dent you can paint over. It's the kind of thing where people would give you the once over and go, why, she's perfectly fine, why is she marked down so much?

But still...dented. Damaged. Fucked up. A crimp in the paint job.

In my mind there was this imaginary paper with my name at the top and then below EXPIRATION DATE 26 YEARS OF AGE. So my unspoken motto, how I lived my life was pretty much, live hard, die young, leave a beautiful corpse. Take no prisoners. Because I was young and I was fiercely beautiful (I only see that now) and I was kind of crazy in a fuck-it way.

I started smoking when I was fifteen. I tried to fill that hole some with smoking. You'd be amazed at what a good time waster smoking is. You have to pack them down, light them, smoke them, hold them away from non smokers. You have to put them out, buy more, obsess over you having enough. You have to hide them from your kids, squirrel some away, make sure you have enough if it snows. I remember when I quit three years ago, the hardest part for me were what seemed like huge wide open chunks of time. The mind boggles at how much of my day revolved around cigarettes. And I remember thinking--when I realized I was actually going to quit this time--well, fuck. Now what do I do?

Okay. Sex, danger, smoking...Booze. Let's go there.

Yes, yes, the running joke is I love my wine. And I do. But I abhor being drunk. Truly. I pay strict attention to my love affair with the red nectar. I come from alcoholics. Not funny lampshade on the head alcoholics, but call 911 he fired a gun in the backyard alcoholics (please note I'm not referring to my immediate household. my mother should be sainted. she raised me and put up with me even in my dragon girl years). We're talking, you pissed me off so I shall beat the shit out of you alcoholics. I'm talking movie of the week alcoholics. There were handful in my family. And it stemmed on both sides of my gene pool. So, I'll tell you this--I love my wine, but I monitor it. And truth be told, I obsess over it a bit. I truly do. If I like it too much, it's history.

That leaves food. I was anorexic in my teen years. I lived on about 400 calories a day. I was 5'10" and 130 pounds. I was damn near translucent. I thought I was fat. Then later in my early twenties when I got pregnant, my up and down with food started. I realized what a good drug food was. I went from getting a high off denying myself to getting comfort from calories. I've spend most of my life either pushing my feelings down with food or starving myself. My body gets very confused. I'm working on it.

So now we move on to the actual fear purge. Like I said, I've spend a whole lot of time stuffing stuff down. Despite falling ass backwards into a priceless man (after a whole swamp full of frogs) and having two wonderful kids (that fifteen years ago I would have swore to you stone cold sober that I would NEVER have because I did not wish to procreate), my life has been about running from the demons I covered with sex, danger, food, cigarettes, booze and various other things. I'm afraid. I have been afraid my whole life and have covered it in some way. See, I have the opposite of what some people have. I have a whole posse of people who have ALWAYS BELIEVED IN ME. Always. I told someone recently, "The only approval I have ever sought was from myself. I still haven't gotten it." And that's true. The only person who has trouble believing in me is me. I can't do it for some reason. Again, I'm working on it.

So let's see where we've landed after this horrid and awkward confessional. A) Fuck it. I don't have to believe in myself so much as surrender to the part of myself who takes over when I write. I need to stop white knuckling and let it do its job. It's already started and only gets tangled when I interfere. The fearful part of me can't seem to stop chucking monkey wrenches into the machinery. see above: i'm working on it. B) I can be afraid all I want, but I have to do it anyway. C) The fear purge has started, I knew it would, I have to go through it. It's the only way out. There is no other exit.

The first purge that reared up last night was the being left fear. I dreamt last night that the man left me. He didn't love me anymore. That was it. He just didn't love me. There was no one else. He just...stopped loving me. And right before I woke I looked down at my engagement ring and the stone was gone. And I was panicky and he wouldn't help me find it. He didn't care. When I looked closer, I realized it had been smashed down into the setting so it was pretty much invisible.

I woke up and my heart was breaking. Literally. I don't know how to describe it to you dear reader, other than I cannot remember--barring my father's funeral--ever feeling so sad and empty. And I started to cry. Not sniffling soft crying. Big sobs. Funeral crying. And I simply could not stop. I couldn't. I ended up getting up out of bed and coming down and making coffee and when the man asked me what was wrong, I started again. I couldn't stop. Even after he shot down ever possible reason and fear the tears kept coming. I seemed to have a neverending supply.

It is, apparently, one of my biggest fears. Losing him. Him not loving me. Losing that love I never ever expected to find but did. I never realized how much of my life I spent asking for love in some form until this morning. I crave it like a junkie craves crack. I think that I think it will fill that missing piece of me.

I know there will be more. More stuff is going to come flying up out of the dirt like that hand at the end of Carrie. I'm too schooled in life and actual education not to know that now that I am going to actually do something that terrifies me, my mind is going to throw up ever road block, every fear, every single boogeyman in my closet. It's a good way to distract from what you're really trying to accomplish. Fear...it's the way we do ourselves sometimes. As stupid as it seems.

I hope you didn't read this if it seemed too long. I rarely fillet myself this way in public. But if you're going to be a part of the journey I'm trying so hard to take, then I'm going to be honest with you. I promise to be back with something short and flighty very, very soon. Maybe I'll accidentally almost burn another house down today ;) (see below for details)

XOXOX
Sommer