Nightmares
Human beings, while for the most part intelligent, labor under two strangely irrational beliefs. One is that if they do everything right, everything will turn out right. The other is that their mothers love them.
Perhaps no one has a happy childhood. Childhood is when you’re small, weak, and impotent; everyone else makes decisions for you, and you rarely get your way. Everything hurts more than it should, because the armor of experience you’re developing is still more chinks than plates: you have to burn your hand a few times before you learn to avoid the fire. Childhood, for most, is punctuated with frightening painful disappointments designed to teach you how not to be afraid. And for others, it’s just one constant frightening painful disappointment.
When the experience of my childhood ended, I desperately wanted to get as far away from it as possible. Desperately wanting to get away did not mean going somewhere . It meant getting away – running hell bent for leather away from what was.
Making this decision and that decision, learning as I went. Lots of wrong ones that led, eventually, to a lot more right ones. Not knowing every choice I made, especially the wrong ones, would always remain with me. Silent. Or not.
It was years before I learned that I would never outrun myself – and that was exactly what I’d kept trying to run from. That early list of failures and miscalculations that had seemed to plague my life was something I could never escape, no matter how hard I tried.
I’m all grown up now. I know about my flaws, my weaknesses. Staying emotionally and mentally afloat is no longer a battle that leaves me exhausted. I long ago accepted that Reality is going to shift beneath my feet on a constant basis, but it’s nothing more than the universe making little adjustments to keep things in line. And sometimes those shifts mean being left abandoned and alone, losing everything, starting over with the old fears.
But Fear’s good because it can help to keep you alive. What kills people is paralysis. No ability to make choices, no ability to move forward. There’s no such thing as a person without fear because you know what would happen? Live fast, die young, don’t stay swimming in the gene pool . Real courage isn’t about charging into the teeth of a problem with guns blazing. It’s about being scared to death and getting the job done anyway.
So when I want to run away again, to go anywhere, I force myself to remember. Everywhere I go, I will just keep running into myself. There’s here, there’s now, there’s this reality, and everything else, promised or not, is only a dream.
Or a nightmare.
And sometimes you have to accept the nightmare, and the fear, and keep going anyway.
