The Opposite of Fear

The more we fear failure the more frenetically our bodies and minds work. We fill our days with continual movement: mental planning and worrying, habitual talking, fixing, scratching, adjusting, phoning, snacking, discarding, buying, looking in the mirror.

I simply can’t bear to get out of the car, to walk into that building, to live one more day in this state of . . . well, I can only describe it as chronic fear. I’m afraid of everything. Of being alive, of not really being alive. Of failing at being alive.

I am often taut with worry and sometimes feel as though we’re only a footstep away from chaos. But I have to hold my nerve, for fear of passing on my chronic sense of unbelonging in this world.

Neurotic fear engages the flight/fight pattern but never follows through on it. This can be simply good sense for smooth living in society or it can be a personal block and thus self-limiting.