Identity Fear

The truth is: the world is a damned fine, loving place and we just better get used to it.

I continue to distance myself from the attractive nuisances of demonizing others, polarization, negativism, worry and anger.

I continue to look away from salacious headlines even as they dance around me yip-yip-yipping like cute, but rabid puppies.

Each day I exert conscious effort to avoid distractions offered by conglomerate media’s Chattering Monkeys In Prom Outfits.

I continue to avoid eye contact with the shiny, soundbite horrors which seem so prevalent in our culture.

I respect the pain felt by others, but, I can no longer accept the burden of owning something that is not mine.

Oh, but, my goodness … they are so very attractive and, in some prurile way, I have seen myself there - high on the Hill of Smugness, waving a flag of “MeMeMe” for, well, … no one.

I know the attractive nuisances are there - I simply choose not to live out the pathology of the national script of divisiveness - of “we-they-them-us’. In the end, the things the advertising delivery systems some call ‘the media’ do not portray an accurate view of who civilized people truly are.

I continue to remember who I was when life was carefree and those little occasions when I experienced true joy in the conviction that everything was going to work out fine - that happiness and fulfillment were just around the next corner or over the next horizon. To this day I think fondly of the simplicity of a warm, Fall breeze through the wing window of a 1950 Chevrolet on a graveled backroad between my childhood home … a girl sporting a pixie haircut and the sassy laugh of a cheeky rascal … and my uncertain future. In that now, the independence, the self-confidence, the peace were euphoric. I knew only inner peace.

Somewhere along the way I took on “Identity Fear” … a form of self-deceit that everything had to be ‘just so’ or I would cease to exist. It didn’t happen overnight … one little sting of rejection here,; a tiny irritation of a harsh word from someone I trusted there; the violent death of a president here; and a war in Southeast Asia there.

Such things became existential threats.

Tiny lashings of emotional pain over time, little hammers of anxiety chipping away at peace, assaulting confidence, telling me and those around me that the world was a terrible place and we better damned well get used to it. Whispers from the fear-shadows of others told us we’d be better off when we realized that the world is disappointing and evil and just went with the flow.

I mistook angst for virtue. I thought absorbing the fears of others made me loyal - even likeable. I became a mirror for other people’s resistance to being truthful with themselves.

I have learned that Identity Fear manifests itself when we stake a claim on one side or the other of any issue; doing so forces us to defend our position - even when our position makes no rational sense.

Or, it’s just stupid.

I have learned that Identity Fear deceives us that we might die if we’re wrong; that we will most certainly die if the “other side” is also right; we might cease to exist if our myths are proven to be just that, myths.

Identity Fear is paralyzing. It is at the root of possessiveness in relationships; at the root of some folks’ belief that they ‘own’ their job; at the root of ‘perfectionism’; and the fear, yes, of success.

There is only chaos in fear. There is only unrealized death in fear. There are only apparitions of horror and failure and Hell in fear.

Fear is, after all, a tiny world. Fear is not who I am. I refuse to let that communicable disease define me.

I have been trained to expect fear.

But what if the word is kind, and I’m simply continuing to learn to give and receive it?

Among the top three life lessons I have learned is the knowledge that when I choose to reject fear, pain, blame, dred, anxiety, apprehension, panic, the soulpain of others and foreboding …

I won’t die.

The world is a damned fine, loving place and we just better get used to it.