Moving through fear that feels fatal.
About that time I confronted the minotaur inside my mind.
A few years ago someone asked me what I believed my birthright was. I didn’t know how to answer.
At the time, I felt stuck and burdened by irrational phobias, and I considered that the answer to the question might be suffering. Chronic panic attacks rocked my nervous system and I often felt sweaty, scared, and useless. I was trapped in a cycle of invasive thoughts, fear, and paralysis, and believed that I was truly here to suffer. It was easier to play the martyr and accept the pain as normal than to navigate through it. I felt stuck inside a labyrinth so I began to make myself at home.
In choosing to exalt my aching and step into victimhood, I handed every ounce of my power to the shadows that kept me stuck. I let them lead. The more I got scared, the more I avoided what scared me, and the smaller my world became. If I panicked, I took it as a signal to retreat until I all but stopped showing up in the world. I implemented rules and rituals to avoid fearful situations that I thought would keep me safe or at least keep the panic at bay. But my fears are like water and found their way through every opening. My world contracted and fear found me anyway.
So I accepted the feelings as a chronic condition and began picking out paint colors for my mental prison cell. I created a safe cocoon in which anxiety became familiar and where I knew that if it popped up, I could ride it out in relative safety. I let fear and anxiety flow, quit fighting, and instead accepted that I might be annihilated at any moment. I confronted the minotaur in the labyrinth, let him wreak havoc, and picked up the pieces.
In doing so, in accepting the idea that I might drown in my tears or crack a tooth while my teeth chattered in baseless terror, I learned that the fear I let keep me stuck inside wasn't as powerful as I gave it credit for. I need to feel it to find that out. The longer I hid, the scarier it got, but as soon as I decided to shine a flashlight into the darkest corners of my mind, I discovered the minotaur was usually a painful memory wearing a set of plaster horns.
Recognition felt like a dawn after a dark and battle-fraught night. I tentatively began to re-expand my shrunken horizons, and, drip by slow drip, refilled the reserves of personal power. I began to let things scare me. I let them know they were allowed to scare me all they liked but I wasn't going to run.
Fear, it turned out, was a bluff charge.
Wise words
If there is a fear of falling, the only safety consists in deliberately jumping.
Carl Jung
ICYMI
Last week, I wrote about being called irrational, pythons in the plumbing, and reframes to retrain your brain.