Life's only true opponent.

“I must say a word about fear. It is life's only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life. It is a clever, treacherous adversary, how well I know. It has no decency, respects no law or convention, shows no mercy. It goes for your weakest spot, which it finds with unnerving ease. It begins in your mind, always ... so you must fight hard to express it. You must fight hard to shine the light of words upon it. Because if you don't, if your fear becomes a wordless darkness that you avoid, perhaps even manage to forget, you open yourself to further attacks of fear because you never truly fought the opponent who defeated you.”
--Life of Pi, Yann Martel

I have been faced with a great deal of fear this year--sometimes so much so that it was laughable. The mind is most certainly a battlefield, and for someone such as myself who thinks enough for two people, it can be a particularly dangerous place. Oftentimes, my fears were not rational. Some of them were borderline ludacris. Last summer, I remember crouching on the floor of the Hobby House (where I taught arts and crafts) and going into a state of pure panic over the quality of my camp crafts. Yes--I was having anxiety over crafts. My thinking went somehow like this:
"If my crafts suck, then I suck. If I suck, this means I don't love the campers. If I don't love the campers, this means I'm an awful person. If I'm an awful person, then there really isn't much point in living. If I can't single handedly change my campers' lives with my crafts, then THERE IS NO POINT IN LIVING."

Scary. One--that I was that narcissistic. Two--that my fears had entered a whole new level of unrealistic pandemonium. Unfortunately, this trend continued on for the better half of the year, leaving my nerves completely shot and my brain on overdrive. I would wake up every morning before work and obsessively run a list of possible failures for the day through my ever running mind. These fears mostly addressed my own emotional state. My biggest worry was that my anxiety or depression would affect the people around me in a big way--not only upsetting their lives but my own.

It is an exhausting thing to live in fear. Especially when, in my particular life, there was much peace to be thankful for. There were no ongoing wars around me. I was not starving. I was not in massive amounts of debt. My fear linked directly to the state of my soul--which, in some cases is scarier than the tangible things we try to control.
Here's what I discovered and what I'm still trying to believe: IT'S not worth it. If fear has a name, it is the all encompassing IT. There are many things that may cause us to feel fear, different for every person and experienced in many ways. But, as stated by Martel above, whatever IT addresses, the core of the obstacle is always our own fear. If we can learn to overcome this, to discover a new way of thinking, to persevere even when our heart and brain are struggling to run as far away as possible, we can do anything.

All I know is that I don't want to wake up one day safe but dead inside. So here's to taking chances, to change the way I perceive myself and to give grace in the times that I falter. Here's to believing that all things really are possible, and that fear is merely an emotion waiting to be defeated. In the end, I'd rather find out that I failed than be left wondering what would have happened if I tried at all.