“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”
— Frank Herbert, Dune – Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear
I have been lost in fears this week, and because of that, I have behaved in a way that was untrue to what I value.
I value personal freedom. I changed my life because of it. I value love, and in my definition, to love someone, you love them as they are where they are. I want my heart to be valued and I want to value another’s. I want the freedom to explore and someone who wants to do that with me – growing, learning, listening and nurturing together and still maintaining the individuality that drew us to each other in the first place.
So my fears… being unable to hold this rickety thing together, this life of mine. Not being able to get out of 2nd gear with it, as the soon-to-be-ex keeps throwing me more flaming hoops to get through. I had been doing so well, and then, with my boss and work, all that goodness being swept away (I’ll never take sexual harassment in the work place lightly again), work became a place of treading water. I fear for my kids, and this life we are forging. My oldest is going through the tortures of the damned, and taking me along for the ride. I’m afraid I can’t help him, save him from all the pain he’s feeling (even with the help I’m getting him). It’s scary as hell, and I’m making it up as I go, falling down all over the place.
When I am most afraid, I wish for a hand to hold. I want a hug. A kiss. A cuddle. Naked playing. A cathartic spanking. Fucked until I’m babbling incoherently or smiling and laughing with the joy of it. I want the person I love. It’s frustrating when it isn’t that easy.
My Darth baggage gave me a lot of uncomfortable hang ups (read fears), more than I like to think about. I need to more. I need to smoke out these demons. I am afraid of being kept in the dark. Lies. Lies by omission. Being in the dark and looking like a fool. He talked a good game about wanting to adventure with me… but never included me. And where I wanted to be special, where he said he loved me back, I was just one of so, so many… a daisy in a field full.
When shit hit the fan in his life, (aka his wife found out) and all the girls he’d been with and seduced came out of the woodwork, he expressed surprise, and ego that they “all thought/wanted to be special.” To which I said, “Of course they do! Of course they thought they were. All of us wanted to be special… Many of us believed that because you insisted we were. ” It made me think of the line from the Incredibles – when everyone is special, no one is. See the field of daisies… Darth kept me there, in stasis, for so long throwing me back and reeling me in, to feed his insatiable ego.
Now fear can twist up your perspective like a rubber band. Like a rubber band getting rubbed between two hands, the known and the unknown – a giant knotted mess, until it’s skewed everything so completely it’s hard to tell what is real and imagined… and that was where I was Friday night, pouring beer on top of it all. An ugly, messy, horrid emotional rat’s nest – with booze! Charming!
Enter my lover, sick and making time for me on the webcam.
Fueled with fear (and beer) we talk about taking lovers without each other – and in my head it wasn’t about that, it was about being thrown out and getting reeled back in. It was about being forth string back up. It was being excluded and lied to or deceived. And so I reacted from that place. So where the mechanics were the same – him/her out enjoying another partner, I wasn’t looking at it like that. All I saw was the emotional beating I took from Darth, with the lies, the false declarations of love, and the hot/cold behavior that had me all over the place.
Fear… it’s just no fucking good.
This is a touchy subject for both of us, from the two points of view we were in. I don’t want to go back to hot/cold, kept in the dark land, and S/he doesn’t want to be with anyone who is going to try and keep her reined in – and that’s how I looked. I looked like the person who demanded that we only play together or never again. It was not a good place for either of us. And it made me look like I had been false advertising myself as a free spirit only to try to bust out the proverbial bear trap of monogamy.
I’m hoping we’ll be okay. I’d be devastated if I lost her/him because of my own fears and Darth baggage… It makes me feel stupid. And weak – that I could succumb so completely to my fears and lose sight of who Misty is (so not Darth) and what we mean to each other (hopefully still).
I need to be braver.