on fear.

“All that we intend is scrawled in sand
Or slips right through our hands
And just knowing
That everything will end
Should not change our plans“ -Hozier

As I have started writing this blog again, one specific emotion jitters through my body, it’s familiar and it’s the one I grapple with harder than any other emotion I feel. It’s fear. I’ve learned an awful lot about myself over the past few years. The last time I wrote anything meaningful for public view was probably a memorial for my grandparents, both of whom have passed in in the time that I haven’t been actively writing. Even now, I feel myself stalling by thinking about the time that has passed and not actively writing about the ways that fear presents, or how I actively struggle with it every day.

It feels silly, I’m sure, that a therapist can feel fear and not know what to do with it and yet here I am, telling you that that I am a therapist that feels fear and I have no idea what to do with it. If you ask me about anger, grief, even sadness— no problem, let’s jump it, let’s feel it. And I suppose the answer for fear is exactly that as well. But it feels so much bigger than any other feeling these days, and I wonder if you relate to this. As I look outside the window in the home I share with my loving partner, and our grouchy dog, I hear cars driving by, children laughing and playing, I hear the buzz of lawn mowers, I hear the much more distant than previous years chirping of birds. I see the sky is yellow, and the air is hazy. It’s not from a beautiful sunshiny afternoon, or the waves of heat made visible in the light. It’s from the smoke created by wildfires in Canada, making its way down to us. I can smell it, and I feel it in the way my breathing becomes labored if I’m outside for even a second too long. This is the third or fourth year that this has become explicitly noticeable, and I find myself afraid. I find myself wondering about the birds who don’t sing as much as they used to when I was a kid, and I worry about the tiny little organs that belong to the squirrels trying to find a cool place to rest and munch on some nuts. I suppose when I think about what the world is losing, I also grow angry and sad, but I’ll save anger and sadness for another post. There are so many different types of fear. This fear is survival fear, it’s legacy and longevity fear. It’s wondering how much time we have left. It’s the existential fear.

When I was a child, I remember being so afraid of dying and death that I would avoid sleep at all costs, for fear I’d die in my sleep and have no way of knowing. And I think the thing I was actually afraid of there was the second part— not knowing. If you know me, you know I hold little to no love for any religious practices, and this is not a judgement on those that do, but it’s my way of saying I really don’t expect much to happen after I close my eyes for the last time. Frankly, the only thing that scares me about that is that I might not know that it would be the last time. That is the uncertainty fear.

Also, when I was a child, but more so as an adult with aging parents, I feel absolutely terrified at the thought of losing them. I watch the way my father can no longer do certain things, things that at the same age his father could also no longer do, and my mind instinctively sees the trajectory of where my fear needs to go. My mother was diagnosed and labelled in remission with Hodgekin’s lymphoma and the fear that came with possibly losing her to cancer, which at this point in my life feels like my mortal enemy, made me have such a visceral reaction that I was unwell for a week. This type of fear is anticipatory fear. Recognition of human mortality.

There’s a distinct fear that comes with the simple unfairness of being a human that will lose people and pets and children and plants and family and woodland creatures and clean air and the world to death or disease or some definitive, permanent, precise ending. This type of fear gets louder with each passing day. It reminds us that it’s there when we spot a new grey hair on our head, or we see another wrinkle on our father’s face, or when the birds get quieter, or our dog starts sleeping harder than he did when he was a puppy which felt like it was just yesterday, or when our children stop needing us as much, or when or when or when.

One might argue that when we feel this, we should just push through it, try not to think about it, it will pass. And they’re right. Not the “just push through it” part. The “it will pass”. Because everything does, and everything will end. Especially when we really need it to not end.

I’m not here to tell you to “savor each day like it’s your last” or to make a gratitude journal. We all know I am not that person. What I will say is that it’s important to lean right up into that fear. Let yourself really get up in there and stop denying that things are, in fact, going to end. Because the second you do that, the more you realize just how limited our time really is and you will learn to weed out the things that no longer deserve your prioritization. The things you are most afraid of are the exact things you should spend the most time on. Maybe this scares you even more. Maybe it requires you to take action on something you have been putting off for the longest time. Maybe it’s a phone call, or visiting a loved one’s grave, or going to that appointment with your mom to hear the doctor confirm your worst nightmare or finding out that the eggs in the nest you’ve been watching didn’t hatch but fell from the tree. The bottom line is that you are going to be afraid. It’s inevitable. The energy is being spent either way, so what if you spent it facing the potential ending in a way that feels like real acknowledgement?

I know these endings feel impossible and it’s because they are. But I also know that when my grandma’s memory was slowly withering away, losing all recollection of me and the rest of my family, the thing I did was not the thing I would do now. What do you do when one of the pillars of your entire worldview no longer has foundation to stand on? What do you do when the person whose face you share also has no idea who you are? What do you do when you can’t control it? What do you do when you have no idea if or when you’ll ever see her again? The only thing I ever knew for sure about my grandmother’s aging was that it would end and I avoided it with everything in me. My grandfather was so afraid of losing her, and he died before her, still afraid of losing her, even when her memories of him had ended.

We all feel this fear. It’s the fear that says, you, this person or this pet or this thing I love so much, are a thing made from the same material as I am, and now that I have you, I am so afraid of losing you. I love you so much that the idea of losing you is my worst fear. Your ending is my absolute nightmare. And it is inevitable. That fear drives us and it makes decisions for us and often that decision is avoidance of the thing we fear losing. But avoiding that thing or person, doesn’t make us less afraid of losing them. It helps us forget them temporarily, and once they are gone, we spend our whole lives trying to be closer to them and forget that at one point we did have that chance and chose not to. It forces us to face an ugliness in the human heart. The truth that my fear of loss outweighed the need to be close at a time when being close might have healed something in both of us. I’m not saying that if I had chosen to go see my grandmother one more time, she would have magically had been healed from her dementia. But perhaps one final squeeze of her fragile little hand, the hands that had made my dinners on Sundays, the hands that had raised her sons and sewn my pants and had held my hands when she knew me as her grandchild—perhaps that would have been a better send off than my inability to accept that she was going to die. What we both probably needed the most from one another in that moment was a way to feel connected to each other. I was terrified, so I didn’t let myself lean in. I won’t ever know for sure, but holding her hand probably would have done a lot of work on exactly that. Because while we spend countless hours running away from pain, we never let our minds go quiet enough to recognize that connection is the cure.

Sometimes the best way to handle it is to just name it out loud in the presence of someone else or just to hear the words fill the room like the smoke coming from these wildfires. Sometimes the thing that makes that fear far more bearable is giving it a name and maybe even a face and to stop running away from it. So much of our lives revolve around just avoiding or running away from the “bad thing”, or making difficult feelings go away.

Every fearful feeling I have ever had was resolved when I allowed someone I love to see me having that feeling. Connection is what cures that fear. Because underneath all of that anticipatory, existential fear is actually loneliness. It’s rooted in thinking you have to face the scariest moments of your entire life alone, every loss, every ending. That you have to be the only witness to the things you have always felt the worst about. But chances are, someone else is also feeling that too. At exactly the same time. When someone else can keep watch while you lean into the hardest days of your life, you are made safe to feel the breadth of it.

My entire job is relationships. I have made my life’s work about becoming the witness to the difficult things that people feel while in my own life, I am still getting the hang of being someone who feels things in the company of others. I fear endings with everything in me, and I know that some day I, too, will end. At 34 years old, I just now am beginning to see that to run from my shadow is to also run from the sunlight, and the longer I do that, the less connected I am to the warmth of the sun. These days, the sun feels hotter, but I remember a time when it didn’t burn my skin the second I walked into its light, and I find myself feeling that same pain of wishing I had stopped to embrace the warmth before it began to hurt too much. With every ounce of light, comes the risk of a burn but 'I’m not sure it makes being in the light any less worth it.

I think the other half of this, is so often we feel as though we have failed if we cannot fix or solve the “problem” that makes us afraid. But endings are not a problem to solve. In fact, the ending is the resolution and I know that is hard to think about. But resolutions are not always about happy endings, they are simply resolutions. The fear is not the problem— it is the exclamation that this is important to you. The in between moments are how we are actually responding to the reality of what we are being faced with and more often than not, we choose to ignore, avoid, or run rather than to connect and look it in the face or call it what it is. But this window of time, is actually the best opportunity to attempt “fixing” anything. But fear so often drives us toward avoidance, or pretending the end isn’t approaching much faster than we are ready to admit. It temporarily allows us to stop our pain and feel as though we have any ounce of control or a say in the way this whole thing plays out. Anticipatory fear forces us into grief and the suffering that comes with it far before the ending has ever arrived. Our humanity forces us to become close to people, it is our nature. In turn, that means we will fear losing them. Which means we will spend a huge part of our life trying not to. But what if rather than trying to solve the inevitable ending, we gave in to accepting the fear and allowing it to fill the room until we are forced to face it together, so that when the end actually does come, we get to trust that we did the best we could. So that it doesn’t feel like we have to solve anything, it just feels quiet. I’m still working on this.

What I have come to understand so far is this: Endings are inevitable. We don’t get a say in that. That acknowledgement feels like the air leaves our lungs with every minute spent looking at it. To feel the fear, try to resolve it, and not be able to just accept the fear means you suffer twice. If everything is going to end at some point, the people who you are around really really matters. No amount of running from how much you love something makes you love it less, so admit you love this thing, admit you don’t want to lose it, and hold on until time does what it does. You cannot be held responsible for the things that time has done since its very beginning.

I wonder for you, what might happen if the next time you’re taking a break from running, you allow yourself to turn around and connect, out loud with the thing you are afraid of the most these days? What about your own mortality or the mortality of the ones you love feels so much larger than the importance of connecting with them and with yourself? Do you even know that it is happening? What if you said it out loud? In front of people? What if you let yourself be fearful about what happens next in the world around you? What if you didn’t hold yourself responsible for finding the solution right away?