Reading Resolute's piece on fear on the Anima website reminds me of how often fear has surrounded my life, constricted it in ways I have tried to ignore rather than face.
When I was a child I was so afraid of the dark, I'd lie in bed with the covers pulled over my head, trying not to breathe deeply, watching to see whether the covers moved when I took my shallow breaths, imagining something or someone looking at the bed and deciding that it was empty and thus moving on, leaving me alone, which was all I desired, I thought----to be left alone.
I lost this particular fear at some point but gained a whole slough of others, it seems, as I matured and came to see myself as somehow "different" and thus in need of hiding again----because how could I allow others to see what I really thought, that school was boring and pointless, that I had no true friends, that my parents didn't really care about me, that the world of so-called "normal" people seemed alien to me and I had no idea how or whether I even wanted to fit in.
And so, it seems, I've tried to do essentially the same childish thing again and again in my life, to figuratively hold my breath and remain unseen as I negotiated the world of school, marriages, family, work----hiding from others, and as it turns out, from myself.
The most pleasant release from this fear that I learned when I was young was through music, reading, and being in nature, all of which continue to soothe my fears, but it seems their release must come from more concentrated efforts that require me to be patient with their revealing themselves over time---- these layers and layers of suffocating blankets I'd come to hide under----peeling them off, one by one, and shaking myself free.
