A few weeks ago, I'm not entirely sure when, I was standing at the curb waiting for the bus. The oncoming traffic was strangely busy for that time of the morning, and as I stood there, vehicle after vehicle came speeding by - mere inches away from me.
And I thought, or rather realized, that I hardly even thought twice about this, hadn't even blinked at the fact that all it took was a few inches and I could have been knocked to my death. This is something that branched out into two trains of thought, one of which was about fear.
I sometimes wonder if my "fear gene" has been disabled. In many situations when a person would feel fear, I hardly blink. One example of this was one night when I was walking home in the dark, the street lamps providing very little light, and suddenly racing at me at full speed was this huge, and I mean huge, big black wolfish dog with teeth bared. The weirdest thing was I just looked at him sort of bored and kept walking. And that just confused him into wagging his tail shamefaced. But it didn't even raise a single alert when, after I realized what I'd just did, I realized I should have felt some sort of fear.
One of the things I do tell myself often is to live as if I don't have that "fear gene". To live fearlessly. I get weak knees at high heights, and also with deep waters. For the first, I've persuaded myself to go on every roller coaster and amusement park ride in one night. The latter, I've jumped into the deep end without thinking and surprised everyone when I easily surfaced after swimming the entire length.
I'm not sure if I can rightly say that I've molded myself into this mindset, or if this is something that's just happened to me. I don't think of superficial things as so important that I get (overly) stressed, anxious or scared. My problem is that all my fear is focussed into one category - that's in my attachment to people.
For as long as I can remember, the one thing I've always been scared of is losing the people I love or care for. I know this isn't me, and is something that's common for many.I think this might be deeply entrenched into my psyche, because sometimes I get panic attacks and sink into a depression that I can't begin to explain.
On one hand I am fiercely independent, and enjoy solitude. On the other hand, when I form attachments they go deep. When I really care about someone, it's so very hard to extricate that attachment from a level of need. I might attribute this to having lost so many people who have been close to me since I was a small child. In one of my bitter moments I categorized the ways I have lost these people: Death, Deception, Distance and D...there is another D category which I cannot remember right now as I type but I will think about it and try to recall.
If I do have any insecurity, I think it would be in this, losing the people I love. I get hurt so easily just from a friend showing some coldness, or losing someone and not knowing why. It eats at me from inside out, and it often makes me wonder why I haven't been able to reform myself into that island that doesn't have attachment.
