On Fear

Once upon a time, I wrote: "Freedom is Fear in high heels."

In an episode of Doctor Who, they described fear as a superpower. They claimed that it can make you stronger, faster, cleverer.

Sometimes though, fear is just a wrecking ball.

I've been freed now a few different times from folks who once tried to hold me back. Folks who made me feel like I was Captain Marvel with that thing that dampened her powers, and then criticized me for being weak. And yet, I've still been afraid.

The time this was most evident was when my former partner and I went on vacation. We visited my hometown, and I hadn't felt so much fear in years. I was afraid that my parents would run into us at random and that I'd freeze on the spot again, unable to get away, and I'd be left there alone again to figure out how to escape. Thankfully, when one of my parents did rear her ugly head, my former partner and the wonderful folks he'd introduced me to recreated a scene from earlier in our relationship: they told me that they were my family now. To quote my former partner: "Damn onions."

I thought that I'd gotten past a lot of my fears over the years, but there's one I still have that I think plagues many, if not all of us: fear of failure.

All my life, I told myself that my biggest goal was going to be to do a better job of raising my children than my parents did. There were so many things from my life I wanted to prevent my children ever having to deal with or experience. In many ways, I have succeeded. In others, I've failed. I've watched my children now navigate several similar scenarios to my own childhood, and I've seen it affect one or both of them in similar ways, only to have similar experiences getting help to handle the long-term effects. Every day, something happens that makes me afraid that my children will look back on their childhoods and hate me as much as I hated my parents for putting me through what they did.

I'm certain I've mentioned this before, so please pardon the repetition:

My stepdad was an alcoholic. My father was a womanizer, and I strongly believe that my lack of ability to ever have a girlfriend over the years was because he was the person I observed the most when it came to learning how to flirt with a woman. Both men made me constantly feel as if I were "too": too loud, too spoiled, too obnoxious, too fat, too lazy, too smelly. Both of them constantly insisted that I needed to be taught to be better or different than what I was. I went from having a healthy first few years on Earth with my mother, to her looking at me through their eyes.

Early on in my relationship with my former partner, I observed some similarities between our relationship and my mother's relationship with my stepfather: their birthdate was the same, with the last 2 digits of the year inverted. There are almost the same amount of years between my ex and I as there were between my mother and my stepfather. Both my ex and stepfather had nicknames involving the word 'Jager,' from the alcohol. Both seemed to be of Italian descent. That being said, there was no doubt in my mind that the two men shared any similar personality characteristics, aside from an interest in football. Yet still, as there had been in a previous relationship attempt, there was fear.

I wasn't afraid of my ex; more that I'd lose him when he realized how complicated my life was. I was afraid my ex-husband would scare him away. I was afraid he'd decide my previous suicide attempt meant I was crazy and not worth getting involved with. I was afraid he'd think my kids were too much to take on. I was afraid I was wasting his time, since living under the same roof with someone had always ended in disaster for me. I was afraid at some point, he'd turn out to be faking being autistic and just turn out to be a psycho or narcissist. I even asked him if he was about to murder me one night shortly after we met, because he was unlike anyone I'd ever known. Was any of my fear his fault? Absolutely not. There was not one single thing he said or did to make me fear him. Yes, he was muscular from lifting weights, but he wasn't intimidating: he was endearing.

What I was most afraid of, at the heart of it all, was that I wasn't worthy of the kind of love I'd been chasing after all my life. No matter how much he reassured me, no matter how much things kept getting better and better, I was afraid I'd get the rug pulled out from under me again, and find that I'd again put my trust in someone toxic. I was afraid that if something so good ended, it would mean that the toxic one was me all along.

I started to think of all the possible things about me and my life that could possibly scare someone away, and I made myself very straightforward and upfront with him about all of them. I didn't want him to ever wake up one day and feel as though I'd hidden anything from him or lied to him. No matter what I laid at his feet, he reassured me that I was worthy.

When I introduced him to my children, he won them over almost immediately. So the day he got his heart ripped out and stomped on, there wasn't a second of hesitation in my mind when I told him he was our family now. He'd proposed a few months prior, having been told before he asked that my answer would be yes. Still, I'd just purchased my first house, and it wasn't the first time in my life a man's family had seen me as a means of offloading him. I was afraid my generosity and my trust would blow up in my face, just as it always had. Like I'd been played. Then, 2020 hit.

All we had was each other. I was more afraid than ever that everything was going to fall apart. I watched my fiance deteriorate before my eyes, and there was nothing I could do. I deteriorated little by little myself. So far that even my therapist sounded hopeless to help me. I woke up one morning and realized I'd gained 50 lbs seemingly overnight.

When the world started to open up again, and I was able to see my fiance dance to his favorite dance in his favorite place, the DJ and I both cried. In the back of our minds though, I think my fiance and I were both afraid it wasn't over yet, and we were right. Our wedding plans had already had to be put on hold because there was no way we'd get the chance to book the venue we wanted. The next hit was finding out our second choice wasn't going to be available either. I'd hoped talking about planning our wedding would give us both something happy to focus on, but just like in the past, it only served to make my fiance gradually more and more upset. Little by little, I started to feel my fear about being too trusting and undeserving of happiness come back.

The time leading up to my Autism diagnosis had its own fears I've already discussed, and along with those were the fears that I'd end up dropping out of school without graduating again. My fear increased exponentially the night I smelled smoke coming from the basement while I was re-doing a homework assignment I'd already failed once, and compounded with the fear that I was so screwed up I'd gotten in over my head on a piece of junk property that was going to burn down around all of our heads, at the hands of a man who'd taken to practically living in the basement. My fear spiraled out of control, even though I was completely convinced I was the one with the upper hand.

I dove into trying to find us a new home, despite my fear that even as good as my credit score was, I still hadn't managed my finances well enough to be a worthy provider; in that, my fear was valid. The amount the lender approved me for was a joke, and when I had to ask him how much money my fiance made in a year, I realized we'd completely bypassed any kind of financial conversation before he'd moved in with us. I decided I'd redouble control of my fear and ask my fiance to make out a budget and send it to me. That only served to reinforce my fear that I was in over my head, because he completely flipped out at the request.

It felt like the harder I tried to improve things, the worse things fell apart. I was in a freefall. And then my fiance came up and told me he'd had enough and was leaving. I realized it was time to let go of my attempts to make things better, and just let go and trust that whatever life had in store for us, we'd face it together.

Giving up on house hunting crushed me. I felt like a total failure. All of my fear fell around my shoulders like a massive weight, and it got heavier when I figured out one day that if we'd managed to buy a new house, we would've lost it almost immediately due to property taxes. My fiance and I started looking into couples counseling, only for it to blow up in our faces multiple times. Everything was falling apart. Even our wedding turned into something that felt more like a chore or a job than something we were looking forward to. The biggest issue of all became our relationship with my son.

When I first met my now ex, I'd hoped that he would be someone who could help improve my relationship with my son and help me find ways to calm his sensory seeking and seemingly constant need to make noise. The longer we all lived under the same roof, the more their once-friendly relationship deteriorated. The family time we all spent together gradually devolved into the four of us constantly floating away into separate rooms. My oldest came out as lesbian, and then transgender and omnisexual the following year. In the midst of COVID, I made time to watch "the video" with them, and puberty hit. Everything became more and more overwhelming, and I watched my fiancé's friends list shrink from differing opinions about the pandemic.

Eventually, my friends list shrank a bit too, and my old familiar fear of being "too" something for everyone came back with a vengeance. It seemed my relationship was still a far cry from its highest point, and after our second relationship counselor was a letdown, I began to lose hope. We trudged through wedding preparations and mercifully got help to the extent that our ceremony was standing room only, despite my fear that our last-minute down-to-the-wire planning would leave us with more leftovers than we knew what to do with. Afterward, I found myself torn between wanting to medicate my anxiety with my prescription so my new husband could relish in the after-party until his legs caved out, or drink as much as I could tolerate, until I wasn't overwhelmed by the environment. I chose option B, since I was sure someone would be buying shots at some point. Despite how happy everyone seemed to be, I was afraid that at some point, I was going to do something that would blow the entire thing to shreds and have everyone screaming and throwing things at me, so I stayed to one corner, and ended up telling my entire life story to a very good friend of my husband's and spending the entire car ride home and part of the next morning afraid he'd divorce me at the first opportunity because of how embarrassing I'd been.

We got through the summer somehow, even though we couldn't afford childcare, and I spent a lot of the time afraid that at the end of one of the many ensuing fights we had, my now ex and I would be no more. I was growing tired of everything coming down to the way I parented. I'd had more than a few people try to dictate to me how it should be done over the years, even before my oldest had been born, and the sheer volume of information thrown at me on a constant basis by my ex was enough to drive me insane. With over a thousand friends on social media, and at least a dozen he consulted for advice on a regular basis, I really was starting to fear that he was just like my ex-husband. It felt like no matter what I said, no matter how hard I tried to put my foot down about something, the harder he tried to convince me I was wrong because his friends said so: even when some of them agreed with me, he still rejected the notion. I felt like he fact-checked everything I said and felt with his friends for the sake of validity, like I couldn't be trusted. I felt as though I'd had the wool pulled over my eyes. Like the title of husband had yet again given a man the idea that he was in charge of my life, he had to manage everything, and I was some invalid who had to be trained to listen and obey. Because he didn't take my advice about how to handle my oldest, he almost ended up having to take a taxi home from his college graduation, where almost no one was in attendance by the end. I was livid, because even my graduation had been marred by the mismanagement of one of the kids (not blaming him for that, but I was devastated that neither one of us had gotten to celebrate the way we deserved to.) By the time he left for vacation last month, I told him late one night that I was looking forward to him being gone so I could have some peace, and he actually told me that he was happy to hear it. I felt as though my fairy tale romance was gone, and had been replaced with a smudged carbon copy of my first marriage.

While he was gone, I threw myself into household projects I'd been wanting to get done, and despite my fear that I'd get myself in over my head, bring the roof down around my ears, or put myself in a position to get into a fight with my husband the second he walked back through the door, I was determined to make as much progress as I could toward making our house feel like a home. If I wasn't ever going to be granted enough of a mortgage to own a $200k home, I was going to make the home I already had feel like one. I wasn't going to let the shitty housing market keep me from doing the things I wanted to do with my life.

While I was throwing myself into improving the house, I asked my husband to complete a list of tasks of his own. Some he did, and some he didn't. The ones he didn't, I spent more time complaining about than I did praising him for the ones he did. I couldn't explain it. I was acting like he was Public Enemy Number One, and even I couldn't explain it. I was acutely aware that early in our relationship, I'd asked him to refrain from yelling because it triggered me, and yet, I distinctly remember being the first person to raise my voice in our relationship. All the while, I had a line from The Good Doctor that would weasel its way back up from the back of my brain. It was from the episode where Shawn's dad died, and he accused Shawn of always acting like a spoiled brat and throwing childish temper tantrums. I even damn near repeated it in my husband's direction one night, and hated that the hurt in his eyes had no effect on me, because he'd interrupted a peaceful night I was having with the kids. I hated that I could hear the words of someone who'd once called themself my friend repeated in my head over and over, telling me not to continue dating him, because he had admitted to not keeping his apartment in order, and would just turn out to be a lazy slob I'd be shouldered with dealing with and never be able to get rid of. Talking with his mother after a bad fight only served to increase my fear that I'd gotten myself in over my head and would never be able to keep the kind of house I needed in order to function at my best. I was increasingly afraid that my home would soon be filled with bugs, and instead of having a place I could be proud to have friends visit, it would always be a place I'd be ashamed of, and I'd constantly be apologizing and refusing to let the kids have sleepovers because they'd have to wade through filth to get to the back yard. I was afraid that despite my best efforts to be a better person than my mother had been, I was turning out just like her. After finding out she'd died, the face I saw in the mirror started to look more and more like hers.

Within a few weeks of my now ex coming home from vacation, we were fighting again. We both seemed to feel as though the other just didn't get it. Like no matter what words we used, nothing was getting through. Finally, I snapped. We got into a fight after a weekend that had been a perfect storm of sensory overload for the four of us, topped off with a healthy helping of my ex-husband pissing me off. I'd been swallowing the desire to end our relationship since before he'd left on vacation, but kept telling myself to chill the hell out and calm down, because within a few days of him being gone, I missed him like crazy and knew I could never live the rest of my life without seeing his smile. That afternoon, my self control slipped, and I told him I didn't want to be with him anymore. I was afraid that if things went on any longer, my oldest wouldn't feel safe in either home, and we'd be fearing again that they were self-harming or preparing to run away, and my youngest would think I was a horrible mother who let a man who was seemingly oblivious to his feelings train him into an almost military-like obedience. Within an hour, I regretted my words.

I came downstairs to find the living room littered with pieces of aluminum foil, and realized in horror that it meant our miniature dachshund had consumed a seemingly lethal amount of chocolate. I felt myself hit the brink of mental collapse; there was no way I could handle losing them both at the same time. No matter how upset I'd been, the decision to end my relationship was still not easy. Losing my husband broke my heart. I knew I had no room to ask after breaking his, but I didn't see any other choice but to ask him to drive us to the vet ER, because I had the sinking feeling if he didn't, our dog would die right there in the living room in my arms. I'd lost my dog in high school, and she convulsed to death in my arms in the back of my aunt's van all the way to the clinic that finally helped her cross the rainbow bridge. I was not comfortable with the thought of that happening again, and I was acutely aware that she was only able to get into the trash can in the first place because I'd left it out. I had the sinking realization that I was a monster and a failure, and my now ex would be wise to get as far away from me as possible.

At the vet, I recognized that my now ex probably needed something to do away from me, so I asked if he would feel comfortable taking my truck and my credit card to buy cigarettes and a collar so I could let our dog down until they could see her. When he got back, we had nothing to do but talk. Seeing as though we were in public, and I couldn't stop crying, we kept our tones civil and level, and per our norm, managed to communicate quite a bit for two autistics who rarely look at each other when we're speaking. The way I saw it, either our dog was going to die, or she was going to survive. If she died, there was no way the kids and I would be able to handle losing her and my husband at the same time, and I feared I'd lose my relationship with my children. If she lived, the only person in the house who could get her to eat what I already knew the vet would want her to eat was my now ex. As much as I knew it was going to take a miracle, it seemed there was no other choice but for he and I to figure out a way to make things work.

By the time we got home, we'd 'ironed out quite a few wrinkles,' and despite the intensity we had then reached, I'm proud of us for having rebounded the way we did, considering only one of us had a therapist at the time, and even that had only been two introductory visits. While there is a lot of information here that some would consider personal, I can assure you that there are issues he and I will still had to work through that have not been mentioned here. I grew up in environments that taught me to fear sharing too much, because that kind of vulnerability could cause embarrassment to myself or my family. I realized long ago that it's far better to share fears, insecurities, what it's like to live with mental illnesses and disabilities, because to not do so is to leave others in the same situations feeling like they're alone in the dark. I think to some extent, we all struggle. Therapists are few and far between, with wait lists six months long in some cases, leaving people to fend for themselves, and often start thinking that the light at the end of the tunnel is a lot further out of reach than the one coming from the Pearly Gates. COVID has left a lot of folks feeling like they're floundering, with lives in pieces and therapists who can't find the right words anymore. Whether therapy helps or not, hiding away and getting overwhelmed by fear isn't something I'm interested in. I've come out of the darkness too many times to slip back into it now.

Unfortunately, life did not allow us both to get past the fears it turned out we both had about our relationship, and it did finally come to an end. Over fear. Since then, I've been faced again with the dog getting into human food, and we both survived. The kids and I have gotten her to eat rice. We ran into a completely random disruption in our neighborhood, and we survived. All the fears I had about being alone again were pretty much dissolved within a month.

I'm feeling the fear and doing it anyway, and refusing to let anxiety win anymore.