Fear

"Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don't really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together and fall apart again. It's just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.

When we think that something is going to bring us pleasure, we don't know what's really going to happen. When we think that something is going to give us misery, we don't know. Letting there be room for not knowing is the most important thing of all. We try to do what we think is going to help. But we don't know. We never know of we're going to fall flat or sit up tall. When there's a big disappointment we don't know if that's the end of the story. It may be just the beginning of a great adventure."~ Pema Chodron When Things Fall Apart

The truth is that I have  lived a large portion of my life in fear. Fear of not being taken seriously, not being smart enough, of being alone, not being good enough or successful enough, and most of all fear of getting sick. Terrified, in fact, of getting sick. The anxiety that has permeated my soul from this particular fear dates back to fairly early childhood, and grew stronger in early adulthood. Over the last year I had been facing this fear head on. I had been working to rationalize my irrational fears of getting sick, had worked on sifting through the root of the fear and what it is about getting sick that I'm actually afraid of. Actively i had been working through this, right up to the very morning of my diagnosis. And now I have cancer. And wheni got the phone call, I literally breathed a sigh of relief. In that instant I was cognitively aware that this fear was going to be addressed, once and for all, and that this was the beginning of freeing myself from it. Then there comes the myriad of emotions that I imagine anyone diagnosed with a dreadful disease experiences. There is the anger, the anxiety, the sadness, the depression. But the fear I was familiar with. The fear did not suddenly become more real. I have been practicing the fear for years, and it has always been real. Cripplingly so. So maybe what I am trying to say is that I am willing to embrace this time in my life because I see it as a real turning point for me. I can't know what this disease holds for me. I can speculate. I can do my best to control what I can control about the situation but I really just.can't.know.