Fear of the unknown

The scariest movie is the one where you don’t see the monster. Why? Because the monster in our head is much scarier – it’s the one that doesn’t let us sleep, it’s the one that has the scariest features, the one that gets our heart beating as if we’re 5 again, afraid to look under the bed. Death is the same way – we don’t know what happens after we die, so we’re terrified of it, we’re terrified of the nothing and we keep hoping that maybe we’re wrong, maybe there is something after – it can’t just end like this, can it? Yeah it can. Does the person who dies care? No. It’s us who stay behind that care. We’re the ones crying now from being left alone, from having to adapt, from mourning and grieving and experiencing pain. We hate it, we’d rather know than not.

As a child I had so much fear, it was poison. I could never predict my mother’s next actions, so I learned how to read her face. I never knew when my father would abuse me next, so I learned to tune out of my body and feelings and pretend it wasn’t happening.  I had no structure at home, so I created one for myself, one that was so predictable, you could draw it out as a system. If my socks didn’t match, it was a disaster. If the papers on my desk were not exactly perpendicular to the edge of it, I couldn’t sit down and begin doing homework. If the edges of my dress were unevenly ironed, I would spend hours flattening them in school, spitting on my palm, brushing the fabric against my thigh, again and again, to make them perfect. You might say – obsessive compulsive from an early age? Yeah, you got it right – it was my way to sanity, my own way of surviving. Did I like it? I never thought of it until life has thrown me a couple things to chew on and watch my own reaction to the unknown. I freak out. I think the worst is about to happen. I calculate all possible scenarios, death is in all of them. I’m used to being threatened with death, and I was once a witness to a phone call that brought death to a family and broke it forever. I am working on eliminating it, of going with the flow, of understanding that even if death is present, there is probably not much I can do – but I still fail.

I picture vivid bloody scenes in my brain, I bathe in horror and I transfer it onto others. I’m like a bird – you can spook me with a wink – my heart rate is 100 times faster than yours. My imagination can carry me away miles away from what you never even saw in your dreams. My ability to experience a full range of emotions in the matter of minutes is nowhere near your typical highs and lows. So forget it – if I don’t know something, if it is something that was supposed to happen and it didn’t – you just dropped a bomb. Fast action. It’s about to explode. I’m about to explode. And, in the process, I’m about to produce probably at least 20 or so casualties – from minor burns and scrapes to the bystanders, to torn off limbs of those who dare to touch me in the process. Scary? Yeah. Powerful? Yeah. Healthy? No.

It amazes me what my brain can produce, coupled with a powerful cocktails of adrenal surges. It’s all on the chemical level, yet it originates with a thought, one single thought that doesn’t match a pattern, a pattern we’re used to, a pattern that was shown to us by somebody else as the one to watch out for, or a pattern that we’re not even aware of, but our brains are. If it’s all a black and white chess board, then a drop of red in the middle is an alert! Our skin crawls, our hair shifts – we perk up and watch out. But what for? We don’t know yet, but out instincts say – something is wrong here. We’ve developed this in our hunting ages, but we forgot how to trust it, so we ignore it most of the time, or dismiss it as dramatic nonsense. Yet we’re correct. We pick up patterns, and we know when something doesn’t fit – we call it a sixth sense. Blink. Whatever the name – some of us are more attuned to it, some less. I am guessing I’m a pattern reader to the dot, and I’m built as a hunter, ready to rouse a whole village for help. Only I imagine the worst monster, of course, based on my own past – and it’s not always true. Not always is there a monster, and I ‘m still working on eradicating this poison from my system. To come to a place of peace. If I can. One day.

Photo by Joaquin Villaverde.