Loving Fear…
I think one of the strangest things about me is that I genuinely feel love for everyone. Everyone. I feel empathy, caring, and love for every human on the planet. Even (sometimes especially) those who have expressed their hatred toward me.
Now, I definitely see how this may seem contradictory, or like a waste of time. But, the thing is, it’s true. I have always loved everybody. I have always accepted everybody. I have always wanted to get along with everybody. As a child and youth, I interpreted this to mean I should be subservient and allow myself to be trampled. As an adult, I’ve had to learn to recognize that just because I feel love doesn’t mean I have to accept bad behavior or toxic relationships.
I don’t know why I am like this, but I do remember being very young and feeling afraid because there were people I was “supposed to hate”… and I didn’t hate them. I was just curious about them and wanted to know what they were thinking. But, I was afraid NOT to hate them, so I pretended to so that I might avoid derision from “the good people”.
I think the reason for this is that I do not inherently feel fear. I feel the “fight or flight” fear in a survival sense – when I am out alone I am cautious and very vigilant, wary of strangers and strange noises. But I do not feel emotional fear about anything except overwhelming love.
The paradoxical nature of the above statement is not lost on me. What I mean is that the only thing that causes me that quailing and unsettling fear is unfettered and infinite Love.
I do recognize that most people cannot quantify infinite. Infinity is, by definition, unquantifiable. However, here is my perspective: love is infinite. When one reaches the point of being capable of indiscriminate love, one’s mind and capabilities become infinite.
From my perspective, it is fear that makes us finite.
It is fear that causes us to hide ourselves.
It is fear that causes us to take shelter in groups.
It is fear that causes us to become angry when faced with undeniable truths.
It is fear that causes us to look at other people with suspicious eyes and hardened hearts.
We fear because we are human.
We humans love fear because we are taught to fear. It is comfortable and safe. All children I have ever met were totally neutral, friendly toward everyone despite appearances or socioeconomic status or demographic. All children I have met in my life were neutral until about the age of 4, when they began to mimic the behaviors and words of their elders.
From an anthropological standpoint, this fear makes sense and is natural – without it, children could not survive long past infancy. We need fear to drive us to stay with our units of birth until we can fend for ourselves. This is very common in the animal world, and it makes perfect sense.
Except for the part where we have a self-awareness. The part where we can make a conscious decision to remove ourselves from fear and remove ourselves from the primal necessity for groupthink.
And so, we fear not because we are born with fear, but because we are taught to fear.
Looking into my own heart, I truly find that the only thing I feel honest fear about is Love. And, it isn’t the feeling of love itself that brings fear to me, but the overwhelmingly immensity of thinking about boundless love. The idea and realization that love is as infinite as the universe terrifies me because the love I feel IS as infinite as the universe and I feel like it explodes out of me.
The issue is that my heart feels this love but my brain tells me it is impossible to feel like this. Like when you try to count to a billion and you get the “mind blown” feeling because you recognize that you could never do it in any reasonable way. So, then I start getting confused and experience a “straining” sensation in whatever part of my brain is about an inch above my left temple – trying to figure out how I can feel an infinite love while in a finite vessel floating through the finite time-space of a human.
It makes me feel detached, ethereal, like I truly am out-of-place.
My instinct is to then go into the old familiar self-talk that comes with believing that there is something wrong with me.
And, I have struggled lately to understand that there isn’t anything “wrong” with me, per se, that my brain is just built in a different format than what might be considered “right”. (I’m running Linux while most people are running Windows.) And, different is pretty much always “wrong” or “too different; didn’t bother”. And, people have always called me “wrong”. And, I’ve always felt “wrong”. So, I don’t know how to feel “right”.
(I’m getting that brain strain feeling again…)
(I think the brain strain is my brain rebuilding itself with the “new” formatting. I have deprogrammed and am actively reprogramming by brain, though this process has happened slowly over the past few years. This new realization is kind of overloading some of my circuits and causing me to feel more confused and emotional than I can handle.)
Lately, I’ve recognized that people are nice to me. I mean, I noticed it sometimes before, but I used to spend most of my time preoccupied with negativity, so I didn’t pay attention. And, so I think that’s where the “aloof” or “superiority” accusations come from – I couldn’t recognize that other people were being nice on a case-by-case basis. But, now I do see this. And, I am not used to it. I don’t know how to reciprocate in the right ways because I’m not used to people being genuinely nice. I’m not used to letting people see the real me and actually being accepted as the real me. As ridiculous as it sounds, it is disconcerting to me that people would want to be nice to me.
I feel unsettled and start to feel a “fight or flight” kind of fear when I think of people being nice to me as ME (as opposed to a false persona created to placate them). It’s truly disturbing to me that I feel this AND that I recognize this feeling as fear AND that my life experiences have taught me to fear positive social interaction.
I recognize that this will be a slow process, but that doesn’t stop me from wishing I could just know what to do. I am comfortable being the outcast. I am used to being a nobody. I’m content with feeling unwanted and like I should just die.
Basically, all of my thoughts about myself run backward in some counter-happiness algorithm that keeps me from feeling upset by the actions of other people. I’m a computer coder, so I’ll write a basic function for how my feelings work:
function calcEmote(){
if(!isset($emotion)){
$feeling = ‘blank’;
$demeanor = ‘neutral’;
$default = ‘smiles’;
}elseif($emotion == ‘content’){
$feeling = ‘cautious’;
$demeanor = ‘smiling’;
$default = ‘laughter’;
}elseif($emotion == ‘upset’ || $emotion == ‘sad’){
$feeling = ‘angry’;
$demeanor = ‘frowning’;
$default = ‘terseness’;
} else {
$feeling = ‘overwhelmed’;
$demeanor = ‘frowning’;
$default = ‘silence’;
}$persona = “I am ‘” .$feeling. “‘so will put a ‘”.$demeanor.'” face on and respond to incoming inquiries with ‘”.$default.”‘.”;
return $persona;
}$Jane = calcEmote();
//ex: $Jane = “I am ‘cautious’ so will put a ‘smiling’ face on and respond to incoming inquiries with ‘laughter’.”;
Essentially, all emotions you have seen from me have been pre-calculated. Not in a bad way, not to manipulate, but as a means of survival. I do not know how to show my own genuine emotions when I feel them, because I have never had the experience of doing so in a social context. Since I cannot speak when I feel strong emotion (and all of my deep emotions are very strong), I adapted to use this formula for social interaction.
And I am comfortable with it, even as I do not like it. I don’t know how to change it. I would like to learn to show my feelings in my demeanor and speech as I feel them, but I don’t know how to do this. I love this calculation because it assuages my fear of ever appearing incompetent or ineffectual.
And, that is why I have a fight or flight response, I think, because I really only have two options: stay or run. I tend to stubbornly stand my ground at all costs when I feel angry because I have some urgent feeling that I cannot let that injustice beat me. I tend to run when I feel happy because I am afraid to feel happy because happiness leads to love.
If you’ve ever debated or argued with me, it takes a wrecking ball to get me to move from a stance. (It has been known to happen, when people have brought me enough tangible proof and statistics from varied and verifiable sources to satisfy my thirst for knowledge and fact-based understanding.)
But, there aren’t many people who have seen me stay instead of run from love. And, that’s sad all around. And, this has been my mission for the past few years: Learn to be Me at all times, not just when I’ve run to a safe place where nobody else can see me. Because the truth is that I always feel love, and so I always want to run away because that love causes me great pain since I cannot express it properly in the moment I feel it. When I try to express it, I end up causing other people to run away from me because they are afraid of the depth and strength and unconditional nature of this love I feel.
I hope someday to be able to show you the true me without having to write about it. For now, though, I’ll just continue to take baby steps backward into that place that is “right”. Each time I run away, I won’t run quite as far. And, someday (believe me, it will happen sometime or another because I’ve got my stubborn ‘stay’ feeling about this), I won’t feel the need to run at all.
Love,
– Jane