I’m roughly four classes away from graduating community college with my associate’s of science, which means I’m having to figure out what degree to commit to, and what university I ought to transfer to.
As exciting as this is, I’m anything but excited to graduate community college. In fact, I’m downright terrified to, for so many reasons.
The prospect of graduating community college and moving onto university has forced me to think very seriously about my next steps; what career can I see myself pursuing, what university can I see myself attending, what will it take to pursue whatever degree I finally decide to commit to?
The biggest question of them all: do I even have what it takes to succeed?
When considering all of the things I know I’ll have to do to succeed at university (and at life in general), I really don’t think that I have what it takes. At least, not yet.
Why? Because of fear.
This realization has led me to have several very emotional therapy sessions over the last couple months. Together, my therapist and I have delved deep into my long list of phobias and fears, theorizing about where each fear could’ve come from, and figuring out ways to overcome them (or, at the very least, cope with them so they don’t stop me dead in my tracks).
Turns out, I have a lot of deeply-rooted fears that have been stopping me from living my life as it should be lived. Some fears are more justifiable and understandable than others. But none of them are helpful. Instead, all they do is keep me imprisoned in an imaginary cage conjured up by the dreadful “what if” game.
So, what exactly are these fears? Well… there’s a lot. But, from what I’ve gathered, most of my fears originate from when I was a newborn baby.
Needless to say, I had a really terrible introduction to life. I was born a blue baby due to Pulmonary Atresia, which meant I was immediately intubated and shipped off to the nearest hospital that could perform open heart surgery on my tiny heart. Because my mom had a C-section, she couldn’t join me at the hospital in Denver until after my open heart surgery, which I underwent when I was three days old.
While recovering from surgery, I was attached to all sorts of machines that hissed and buzzed as they sucked fluids out of me, and forced oxygen into my airways fast enough to keep them from collapsing. I was constantly poked and prodded with needles, while also being denied any sort of pain medication because I was too small to handle it.
That said, I was never left alone. Friends and family constantly held me and stayed by my side. Everyone did their best to make do with the situation, and treat me like a normal newborn as much as possible. In the end, I survived (obviously), but not without some deeply, deeply, deeply rooted psychological and physiological scars that still interfere with my daily life.
Of course, the hospital still scares the ever-loving shit out of me, even if I’m going there just to drop something off or undergo a routine checkup. No matter how hard I try to hide the fear, the blood pressure cuff never lies. I once clocked a heart rate of 180 beats per minute while sitting perfectly still getting my vitals taken. The nurse was freaked out, until she pulled up my past charts and saw that my fast heart rate and high blood pressure were normal for days like that.
Unfortunately, my hospital-related fears have greatly overgeneralized into other settings, resulting in me avoiding and freaking the fuck out things that I have no good reasons to avoid or panic about.
My fear of elevators and airplanes (and being crammed into tight spaces in general), likely originates from having to be strapped to a table in order to get an MRI scan, until I developed just enough self-control to stay in one place while I got my lungs scanned. But I can’t say it was “self control” keeping me on that MRI table. Rather, it was paralyzing fear that kept me frozen in place.
Due to this fear of planes and elevators, I hardly ever travel, and I never ride the elevator unless I absolutely have to.
It’s not that I don’t want to travel. I really do want to go to places all over the country (and even the world). Unfortunately, I just can’t see myself flying alone or with someone who isn’t willing to physically push me through the jetway onto the airplane, and then endure my gorilla death grip around their wrist when the plane does anything remotely scary. In other words, my intense (and growing) fear of flying is the real reason why I didn’t go to the family reunion this weekend. There, I admitted it!
As for my fear of elevators, I’ll be graduating community college having never stepped foot in the hallway leading to the elevators on campus. When questioned by my peers and professors as to why I always take the stairs, I’ll always lie saying, “It’s leg day every day.”
While it may be physically healthier to hoof it up several flights of stairs, mentally, I’m doing myself a tremendous disservice. Yet, I can’t see myself facing my fear of elevators alone or with strangers. Once again, I’ll only get on an elevator with someone I know and trust; someone I know and trust, who also has much stronger nerves than I do.
Unfortunately, these fears aren’t even my worst or most disruptive fears on the miles-long list. The vast majority of my fears are much more commonly encountered on a day-to-day basis.
For instance, while I don’t remember anything that happened when I was a newborn, I do recall the two times doctors tried to get me to wear supplemental oxygen while I was hospitalized with MRSA lung infections later on. The first time happened when I was six years old, and it took several adults to hold me down long enough for the supplemental oxygen to raise my pulse-ox to a safer level. The second time happened when I was twelve years old, where I absolutely refused to wear those damn oxygen tubes at all.
When the psychologist at the hospital asked me why I was so terrified of wearing the oxygen tubes when my pulse-ox was dangerously low, I admitted that I didn’t like the feeling of air being forced up my nose. “It feels like I’m trying to breathe water,” I vividly remember saying with tears in my eyes, “I can’t take normal breaths and that really scares me, especially since I feel like I can breathe just fine now.”
Ironically, me freaking out over the prospect of wearing oxygen tubes raised my pulse-ox to a safe level. At the same time, that absolute terror made me physically sick, and I can still remember exactly how I felt all these years later.
Unfortunately, that fear of hissing oxygen machines overgeneralized outside of hospitals and into nature. My “lizard brain” fails to differentiate between the sound of wind in the grass, and the hiss of an oxygen tube. When my face is against a strong wind and the air goes up my nostrils, temporarily taking away my ability to breathe, I panic. Logically, I know I shouldn’t panic, but my body takes over anyway.
As someone who loves the outdoors and lives in Colorado of all places, this particular fear is not a healthy one to have. In fact, it’s one of my more embarrassing and hard-to-explain fears. But a very real, and a very disruptive fear nonetheless.
Same goes for bees and wasps. I’ve never been stung by anything, likely because I have a tendency to immediately bolt away from any sort of buzzing noise I hear. Again, my fear of wasps and bees likely originates from my days in the hospital, when I was hooked up to machines that buzzed and was constantly pricked with needles. And again, I logically know that there’s no reason to panic in the presence of a friendly honey bee or even a yellowjacket. Yet, I do anyway, because… well… that’s just how I’m wired, apparently.
However, I do have several up-close pictures of wasps and bees pollinating wildflowers in the spring and summer. If I’m so damn scared of those buzzing little bastards, how did I manage to stay calm enough to get those pictures? Truth is, none of those pictures (except for one, which was of a giant, stingless bumblebee on a musk thistle) were taken intentionally. I was simply focused on taking pictures of the flower itself, when a bee or wasp decided to photobomb me while I was too focused on the flower to notice. But as soon as I became aware of the fact that there was something other than a flower mere inches away from me, I instantly jumped backwards and put at least fifty feet between myself and the flying thing in question.
I wish I was exaggerating.
I could continue going down the list of my nature-related fears, which includes thunderstorms and anything with claws. But, that would take way too damn long. So, if you can name something in nature (besides snakes, as snakes are one of the few things in life that don’t scare me for some weird reason), chances are, I have a pretty significant fear of it. As a result, I don’t really do anything or go anywhere nature-related alone, unless I know the place better than the back of my hand, the weather is perfect, and I’m armed with bear spray. Even then, I’d be lying if I said I never got scared on my solo valley hikes. Honestly, I’m surprised the starlings haven’t repeated “oh shit, what is that?!” back to me yet.
As much as I fear nature, I revere and love it even more. Indeed, not even my greatest outdoor-related fears can keep me indoors for long, which is a good thing. It means that I’ll always have a lot of drive to get over my nature-related fears, so that I can intentionally take pictures of bees and wasps carrying out one of the world’s most important jobs: pollinating our earth.
More importantly, I desperately want to hunt, fish, hike, camp, etc. without my fears getting in the way of me doing them. After all, I’m at my best and happiest when I’m enjoying the great outdoors. My favorite memories come from the days I spent out-of-doors, either in the wilderness or on the farm. And I always return home from the woods a much better, more patient version of myself.
But in the moment, even when I’m locked, loaded, and hunting for big game with some of the most badass outdoorsmen I know, I still get spooked very often. Sometimes, I even want to quit with tears in my eyes as I fight back the urge to panic. But, those moments of pure terror followed by the satisfaction of pushing through them, turn into cherished memories that will last forever in my mind. In turn, my fear response is slightly diminished each time. If I do the scary thing enough times and realize that I was never in any danger when encountering that scary thing, perhaps the fear will go entirely extinct.
In other words, the only way to bring my fears to heel is to expose myself to them. The longer I wait to expose myself to a fear, the worse that fear becomes because my mind has a tendency to catastrophize about what might happen. I’ve been undergoing exposure therapy all my life, with varying levels of success. For me to successfully encounter something I’m afraid of and come away with a bit more confidence in myself, I have to surround myself with the right people for the job, as I can’t face my fears alone. At least, not initially. Why? Because my body, and to an extent, my mind, work hand-in-hand to give me every reason to avoid what makes me fearful, no matter how ridiculous my fear may be. I need someone else around to push me forward as I face my fear, so I don’t instantly run away from it.
My great uncle Courtney was the first person in my life to figure out how to successfully help me face my fears. After being a law enforcement ranger for over forty years and literally living like a mountain man his whole life, not even a bluff-charging grizzly can scare that guy. Naturally, having him around when facing one of my many fears (both rational and irrational), has helped me tremendously in the long run.
For instance, I’m not afraid of heights, except for when it comes to climbing. I have no problem hiking along the edge of the hogback in the valley and staring down at the cars on the road 300+ feet below me. I have no issues going off-roading in the mountains with my dad. And I absolutely loved going on the Raven’s Rim zipline in Moab with my mom and little brother. But climbing (or worse, dangling off the side of a fucking cliff) is a hell no from me.
Unless I’ve got my great uncle Courtney encouraging me, of course.
“If you want that bull elk rack, you’re gonna have to get it yourself.” uncle Courtney told me on my eighteenth birthday.
Those antlers were hanging about seven feet off the ground on the scaffolding of his barn, and were my birthday present from him if I could get them off the wall. As scared of climbing as I was, I did it anyway (after all, it was a really nice rack). Of course, I was freaking out in the process, and literally begging my great uncle through gritted teeth to rescue me once I was at eye-level with the antlers. But instead of catering to my fear, he first took the antlers off the wall without my help whatsoever, then calmly guided me back to the safety of the concrete floor.
When I asked him why he had me go through all that when he could’ve just taken the antlers down himself, he replied, “I just wanted to see if you could climb up there yourself to get them.”
A few years before that, I was on the farm in North Dakota, when my great uncle offered to take me shooting in the back pasture where the remains of a huge cottonwood tree were piled up, providing a perfect backstop for bullets. But to get there, I had to drive his manual-transmission pickup truck to the back pasture (which I really didn’t want to do, but he made me do it anyway). Once there, I noticed that there was a sizable wasp nest buried within the log pile. Before I had a chance to throw myself back into the truck, uncle Courtney took his 9 millimeter out of his holster and unloaded the whole clip into the wasp nest.
Turns out, my great uncle knew that the wasp nest had been abandoned for some time. Still, it took him awhile to convince me to come back and there were no angry wasps to run from, as I took off sprinting towards the farm when I saw him draw his gun.
Unfortunately, uncle Courtney hasn’t been able to help cure me of all of my stupid fears. But, he’s certainly given me the encouragement and many of the tools I need to get over my fears without him. Plus, if I want to spend more time with him, I’m gonna have to go wherever he’s at, which forces me to conquer my greatest, most disruptive fear of them all: driving. Especially driving on the interstate.
I didn’t get my driver’s license until I turned eighteen years old, because I was just that scared of driving on even the quietest country roads. Even after earning a perfect score on my driving test the first try and getting my license, I refused to drive basically anywhere I didn’t already know like the back of my hand. It took me two years to overcome my fear of taking unprotected left turns, and I’ve only been driving on the interstate by myself for two weeks (at the time of writing this).
In just these two weeks of forcing myself to drive on the interstate every single day, I’ve made tremendous progress in overcoming my fear of driving. Not only can I drive from one mountain town to the next, I was even able to take my mom and little brother to the airport so they didn’t have to fork over $20 bucks a day to park in the airport’s parking garage.
Does the interstate still scare the ever-loving shit out of me? Absolutely. I’ve had tears in my eyes a few times since I started driving on the interstate. I even cried after my first time driving 470 alone (from the Kipling exit to the Wadsworth exit). Even so, I’ve pressed on through the fear and reminded myself that, as scared as I might be, I’m still able to fly down the freeway at 60+ miles-per-hour and be just fine. Hell, I can even hold my own in the presence of huge semi-trucks that refuse to let me over till the very last second, with my mom riding shotgun, all without losing my shit or causing her to lose hers!
Perhaps, I can commute to whatever university I choose to attend, after all.
Well… the only issue with me facing my fear of the highway is that I’ve been coming home absolutely exhausted after each round. Just today (Sunday), I drove back-and-forth on 470 between Morrison and Santa Fe Drive three times, only to come home and pass out on the couch for a solid forty-five minutes. Thing is, I didn’t intend to take a nap. I simply got home, sprawled out on the couch to greet my dogs, and woke up forty-five minutes later to my dogs barking at the neighbor across the street.
I understand why I come home so exhausted after taking on the highway. When I’m afraid, my body goes into fight-or-flight mode. This means that my heart rate skyrockets, my pupils widen, my hearing intensifies, my muscles tighten, and my breaths get deeper and faster. Of course, the fight-or-flight response uses up tons of energy very quickly; it’s the equivalent of sprinting. When I take on the highway for 45 minutes or more, I’m basically forcing my body to sprint for those 45 minutes without any sort of a break.
It’s no wonder I come home from my drives on the interstate absolutely annihilated!
Good news is, the more I get on the interstate, the more my body will get used to it and figure out that I’m not in extreme mortal danger every time the speedometer exceeds 60 miles per hour. Even if I ever was in extreme mortal danger while driving so fast, no amount of adrenaline’s gonna rescue me. In fact, the tighter one’s muscles are in the event of a car wreck, the more likely one is to get seriously injured or killed. That’s why drunk drivers are 50% more likely to survive a crash than sober drivers (but for the love of all that is good and holy, do not drive drunk, high, or tired).
As time goes on and I get more and more used to driving on the highway, my body will stop responding to the highway as though I’m sprinting away from a swarm of pissed off wasps. I just have to keep driving on the highway day after day, rain or snow, sleet or shine, wind or calm, until my body figures out that there’s no reason to waste so much precious energy when literally nothing’s happening.
All that said, it’s okay to feel emotions. It’s okay to feel afraid. It’s even okay to express that fear outward to release some of the pressure building up inside. But, it’s not okay for me to give into those emotions and spend my life avoiding every little thing that scares me. If I did that, I’d never leave my house!
Of course, there are a few things I should (and do) avoid to help keep my fears at bay. Those few things are the news, social media, and whatever drama’s going on in my family.
I’ve come to realize that there’s not a damn thing I can do to influence whatever’s happening on the news/social media, let alone what’s going on in my own family. I can’t force my great aunt halfway across the country to eat right and exercise for the sake of her health, just like I can’t force the government to do anything about anything, really.
I can’t dictate whether or not the weather will stay nice or turn nasty. I can’t control what other people do online or in public. I can only control what information I take in, and how I personally react to things that are going on around me.
I’m not saying it’s good for everyone to just stick their heads in the sand and ignore everything. We need to have some awareness of what’s going on around us. But, it’s not healthy for anyone, let alone for someone as neurotic as me, to watch the news 24/7, scroll through the bullshit on social media, and constantly refresh the weather radar.
Personally, I have zero social media, and I limit myself to 15 minutes of scrolling through the local news website every morning. When bad weather’s on the way, I keep an eye on the radar only periodically and pay attention to any watches or warnings that may be in the area. But, that’s about it. That’s about all that I can healthily handle. And, that’s okay.
Note: I’m not sure whether the following pages connect to the rest of the blog, or if they’re part of something else. But, I’m keeping them together because this section also deals with fear, just on a more broader scale.
Unfortunately, we live in a world that is not only impossible to fully disconnect from, society actively discourages people from disconnecting from things they have absolutely zero control over. We didn’t evolve to handle problems outside of our small villages and tribes. And yet, society expects everyone to be aware of every little thing going on in the world, from wars to the global economy, to celebrity drama and things going on between other people that have absolutely nothing to do with us.
As a result, the world’s experiencing an epidemic of anxiety and loneliness; I’m not at all alone in my struggles with anxiety and fear.
Mental health issues of all kinds are at an all-time high. Suicide rates are at an all-time high, and are increasing still. Crime rates have also increased dramatically (not quite to the numbers they once were in the 80s and 90s, but the rates do keep going up), along with homelessness and destitution. Overall, the world’s seemingly going to hell in a handbasket, and there’s no signs that it’s gonna get better anytime soon.
Naturally, as things get scarier and more uncertain, many people turn into political/cultural extremists. Politically speaking, things are more polarized in this country than they have been since the Civil War. I’m not just pulling this out of my ass either; the Pew Research Center has tons and tons of data and articles showing just how bad things in the States have become.
Long story short, people are scared. There’s a wave of anxiety washing over everyone in the country, and in the world, almost entirely over things that aren’t even happening to them! Personally, I blame social media and the 24/7 news cycle for this unprecedented wave of anxiety plaguing our world.
Before social media and the 24/7 news cycle, most people only had a vague idea of what was going on outside of their communities (and even what was going on inside their own communities). But as soon as social media and the 24/7 news cycle dominated the world, mental health issues skyrocketed, because people suddenly became instantly aware of literally everything happening in the world at once, in 4k HD no less!
Thanks to that, more and more people are losing touch with reality, and are becoming less tolerant of and resilient towards things that make them uncomfortable. Most growth happens when we’re uncomfortable. Like I mentioned previously, the only way for me to overcome my fear of driving on the highway is to… well… drive on the highway. The only way for me to build muscle is to consistently exercise to the point that I get sore afterwards. The only way for me to maintain a healthy social life and make new friends, is to go outside and interact with people even when I don’t feel like it; even when I’m a little uncomfortable and anxious.
On the flipside, if I don’t consistently drive on the highway, my fear of the highway will come back with a vengeance (much like my fear of flying has). If I don’t exercise regularly, I’ll lose muscle and energy. If I don’t regularly go outside and interact with other humans, I’ll basically develop the personality of a feral barn cat. These same rules apply to literally every human on earth...
