Step Two

The blog. Why is this necessary? This is really more like a public journal, and that feels rather self-indulgent. So why am I insisting on sharing? I touched on this briefly under Step 1, but I’ll expound … I’m afraid if I don’t out myself – and by that I mean, my anxiety, my hopes, my fears, my plans – then all that stuff, good and bad, will just stay inside my head and fester.

For example (and stay with me here, this is a rambler), I have an overly active imagination, to put it mildly, and that imagination is usually applied to things-I-need-to-be-afraid-of. To counter that fear (and this may not make sense to everyone out there, but it works for me), I have cultivated a love of horror movies. Not slashers, not psycho-killers – nothing that actually happens in real life; but zombies, vampires, ghosts, and ghoulies. For me, that takes the fear out of my head and puts it on the screen – it makes it something I can be afraid of for two hours, and then laugh about later. “Remember when I threw my popcorn over my shoulder during that one scene?” “You mean you don’t watch scary movies through the holes in the afghan?” The other night, I was coming home from yoga after dark (our driveway is a mile-long gravel road that we are at the absolute end of), and I convinced myself that a once-beautiful-but-now-clearly-ravaged-by-death-and-out-to-do-me-harm woman was going to step in front of my car, in a billowing white dress, and I would slam on the brakes (“Drive through her, dammit, Stacey! You know she’s a ghost!”), and we all know how that ends. But then I started laughing at myself, because I don’t really believe that could happen, yet I’m afraid of it.

And I realized that I walk around everyday being afraid of things like– “What if we lose the house?” “What if one of us gets really sick and we wind up broke and on the streets?” “What if I die in a car accident tomorrow and I’ve spent the last day of my life in this job I hate?” – and these things are really just as unlikely as that beautiful-but-ravaged-and-definitely-evil ghost. They’re my ghost fears. And OK, so I acknowledge that they’re there, but I don’t have to let those fears rule my every waking/sleeping minute. And I think I should probably learn how to laugh at them.

Part of the reason for the blog, then, is a need to verbalize these things. And I also need to know that – because it’s not just in my head anymore – other people are looking for me to take action. Again, if I don’t put this out there, I’m afraid I’ll just sit here with it and continue in my pattern of job/desperation/different job/different desperation, etc. This is my accountability. Even if you never read this, I know you might be reading it, and that’s enough to keep me writing and researching, etc. Or at least that’s the theory.