Fear belongs in the pit of my stomach.
Fear is one of the sneakiest emotions. I often find myself overcome with fear; not in a horror-movie, jump-at-a-squeaky door kind of fear, but the worry-fear that comes from the unknown.
I’m scared of a lot of things. Most of the time I think have control over this, or I do a fair job of manipulating my own thoughts to avoid dwelling on the negatives.
But occasionally a certain fear will take root in the pit of my stomach. It actually nauseates me and the room will spin. I feel it spread quickly out through my nerves, or maybe in my veins (I’m not sure if fear prefers circulatory or nervous systems of the human body). Regardless of how it travels, it gets there; it arrives at my fingertips, at my feet, at my tongue and suddenly I’m doing and saying things that I would not normally say or do.
Now this could be perceived as a good thing. I like to believe that it is this spread-of-fear that would make me the smartest of all the actors in a horror flick. The fear in my stomach might cause me to run down the stairs and out of the house, contrary to what the blondes without bras do in most of those films.
For life, however, it hasn’t proved to be a great thing. Today, I found myself panicking, literally hyperventilating, because my shower tub wouldn’t drain. It was clogged. But for some reason, that simple loss of control ignited my gas-laden fingertips so drenched in my own fear that I was set aflame. It was completely irrational, but my fear of a doctor visit scheduled for next week has got me into all sorts of a mess as I try to function in my normal daily life.
So this week hasn’t been fantastic for me, and next week is promising to be even worse, unless I can keep the fear in the pit of my stomach where it belongs. There it can stay and make me gag a little and haunt my core all it wants, but I’ll be trying my damn hardest to stop it from venturing out into the rest of my body, and from affecting the rest of my life.
