Fear: Does it motivate you or paralyze you?

What would you do if you weren't afraid?

I find that most of my life has been filled with fear.  'Bullshit,' my friends are thinking.  My friends that read this.  I think that they see me as this totally brave woman.  A fearless woman who just goes out and does instead of sits and says.

If they really knew how afraid I am.  How afraid I've been. 

I think we are all afraid and I really don't feel special in this.

I have looked fear in the face though, and I have used it to motivate me.  But I do admit that there is a lot more that I feel is paralyzing about fear.  There are a lot more fears and anxieties that I have than confidences.  I'm just a really good fucking actress.  Maybe.  Or maybe people really can see right through me.

What would I do if I weren't afraid?  What have I done?

Leave him.  Hurt him.  Admit that there is no other way.  In admitting that I am a lesbian, I could not stay married to him.  For a long time I tried to find ways to leave him without hurting him.  I tried to will him into leaving me, thinking he would hurt less.  I never wanted him to get hurt.  I don't want anyone to hurt.  I was afraid, so I got married.  I was afraid, so I stayed married.  I was afraid, so I got divorced.  Fear was paralyzing and motivating. 

Fall in love.  Not use my body as a tool, as a way to avoid real communications or real relationships.  It's easier to fuck than talk.  It hurts more to be rejected for my thoughts than my body.  Talk.  Listen.  Share.  Even this blog, its' all fear based.  I get afraid.  I get quiet.  I come here and write.  It's bullshit.  To those who've told me it's so brave... bullshit.  It's not.  So... I try to make this as an authentic place as possible.  At least I can do that.  These, my friends, are the truest of my thoughts and feelings that I can share.  This is as close to me as one can really get.  My body is not involved.

Forgive.  Them.  Me.

At one time in my life I was afraid of failing, and that fear did NOT stop me from becoming a nurse.  Again, though, the fear is back.  I don't think it's a fear of failing this time.  I don't know what I am afraid of.  But the fear is there, on the surface and I have two simple choices.  Stay in school.  Quit school.  I really feel like I am meant to be a midwife, or rather, I am a midwife.  But I made choices and now, continuing my education at this point seems questionable. 

I chose myself over the lie of my marriage that was killing me.  I chose loving my kids fully over struggling to fight the resentment that was building daily while parenting them on an empty tank.

What would I do if I weren't afraid?  What have I done?

Play the guitar; Tailor my own clothes; Buy a real camera and learn to use it; Audition for community theater; Interview for a per diem RN job; Return at least one creditor's phone call; Learn how to make sushi; Cut my own hair; Wax my own bikini area;  Apologize; Forgive; Own a pet that I can't just flush down the toilet if it dies; Continue an unplanned pregnancy; Terminate an unplanned pregnancy; Talk without shame about those hard choices; Tell a friend the truth instead of biting my tongue; Write this blog as if no one ever reads it; Let myself cry and not stop; Admit that I am afraid...

There's a lot.  Too much.  So much.  But I have to keep moving forward and I must keep facing my fears.  At the end of the day I want to say, "I did all I could.  I did my best."  Some days, I wonder if that's true, sadly.

Reflecting on National HIV Testing Day

I don't feel particularly close to my sister. Or at least I don't feel like I think I am supposed to feel in accordance to the Hallmark cards I've read and the Lifetime movies I will deny I have ever watched. It's ironic (pay attention Kevin... irony explained) because we are actually very close in age. Seventeen months apart were our births to be exact. So we grew up as "Irish twins" so to speak. I have horridly embarrassing Christmas photos from the early 80s to prove it.

When we were very young we were forced into having the "benefit" of being each other's built in playmate. I didn't think it was so bad. I'm the older sister. I used to watch her sleep. She had blond hair and big brown eyes... tan skin and the cutest little grin ever. I felt like the family outcast with my brown hair and glasses. We shared everything whether we liked it or not. Those nights that we shared our bedroom and a bed, I would lie awake and watch her sleep and just admire her perfectly cute button nose. One time I even bit it. Not too hard. I just had to have it in my mouth.

We are both adults now, and I don't bite her anymore.

Last summer my sister came to me, very upset because she had found out that someone she'd slept with was "sick." I think that's all she told me, just those words. I didn't say or ask anything. I just listened to her. Then I tried to make it explicitly clear that she wasn't a horrible person like she was insisting that she was. I took her to a health clinic the next day for a free HIV screen and afterwards held her while she cried in the parking lot from the relief of it all.

We talked about it a little... the choices she'd made and the future choices she wanted to make. I never feel comfortable talking to her like that. Even though I was born only seventeen months before her, sometimes it feels like it was seventeen years. Sometimes I feel like I'm mothering her. And I don't want her to feel that way. Maybe she does too. Maybe she wants to feel that way. I don't know... Writing about our mother is another blog, another day. Basically, why do I feel like I mother everyone... is what I want to know?!

The only other time I felt like she "came to me" and I was really there for her, was when she stood in my kitchen and told me she was pregnant, in a very unplanned manner. I just hugged her and said, "There's plenty of time to sort out how you feel and what you want to do." Or something like that. Eight some months later I was driving to the hospital because she "couldn't take it anymore" and I sat next to her during her cesarean section... a very unplanned birth to go along with her unplanned pregnancy.

My heart is tied so tightly to hers. She doesn't even know it. She sees us as being very different women, living very different lives. All I see is my beautiful baby sister with a button nose. I see such similarities in us I could never explain to her in words, but I can try here.

We've both fought, a lot, for what we have. I think she assumes things come "easy" to me, and perhaps certain things do. But I hope someday she will recognize and honor the struggles I've had to overcome as well. Though our struggles aren't the same, we are fighters nonetheless.

Our journeys into motherhood have been unplanned. It may look as if my perfect family was... well.. perfectly planned. I think now that as I've come out to my family, she may see things differently. Perhaps not. When I see her mothering her daughter, though, I know that we are truly more alike than different.

I'm proud of her.