Looking forward to living, but afraid of living
Midnight scribbles: Wanting but flinching, do you too?
It feels like I carry a paradox in my chest like a stone, still looking forward, still reaching for the pulse of living, and at the same time trembling at its immediacy. I am afraid of living. There is a strange fear that keeps building up in me: want to feel, want to breathe, want to inhabit each moment fully, and yet there is something lurking in the name of “fear” as if doing “life” might unravel something I have been holding together. I do not always know what I think will unravel, but I only know that I get afraid. Sometimes I wonder what it is, exactly, that makes living feel terrifying and too much? At its worst, I am haunted by a fear that I might die without ever truly living. I do not mean that I have done nothing. I have done things. I have had days. I have survived. I have watched time pass and known I was in it. But the fear is that my life will be made of fragments, little safe fragments. Moments I allowed myself, then retreated from, a life always lived at arm’s length. If I am afraid of living, and I keep pulling back from the very experience that promises meaning, is that not also a kind of existence. A hesitant existence, if I have to be precise. A life where fear and hope keep touching each other, like two wires that should not meet, and still they do. What kind of life is that. Is that the only life there is for some of us. Or is living, in its truest sense, simply learning to hold this paradox. To let it sit heavy in the chest, and still take a step forward anyway. I once read about “self-actualization” from Abraham Maslow. From what I could recollect and understand is, living in a way that actually unfolds one’s potential. A life where authenticity, creativity, and purpose are structural. He suggested that fear often pushes us into safety and predictability, and that we become spectators of our own lives instead of participants. Is that what I am doing? Because I admire my own life from a distance, the way I can prepare for living, think about living, imaging living, plan living, and still delay the thing itself. Safety can look like so many things, sometimes it looks like waiting until I am ready, until I am healed, until I am better, until I have earned it. And i do not even know what “it” is sometimes. I only know the shape of postponement. Because vulnerability of life is, not being able to control how life lands on you, and more how you land on life. Of letting yourself be seen, and letting yourself care, and letting the world touch you. I want to live. I want laughter that wrinkles my eyes. I want the ache of love, because it proves I care. I want the kind of joy that feels slightly dangerous because it makes me feel how much I could lose. And still, I can feel the hesitation in my chest like a stone. A dark cloud walking beside me like a shadow, taking the name of fear. What if living leaves scars I cannot soothe. What if truly living demands more that I am ready to give. I think some part of me has been conditioned to equate living with risk. Risk of pain. Risk of failure. Risk of loss. Risk of humiliation. Even risk of being misunderstood. There is a part of me that treats intensity as danger as well. As though feeling something fully is the same things as stepping off a cliff. We are taught, in so many ways, that the ideal is to be without fear, as though it is a flaw. But I think fear is not something we eliminate and more of it walks with us into the act of living, and the real question is how we relate to it. I also think about the way fear is built into us. I have read little about it in cognitive neuroscience, and it is hard to escape the basic fact that fear has survival value. It arises because it improved the odds of staying alive. It is not there to make me happy or fulfilled. It is there to keep me from dying. In the modern human, I think those circuits are misfiring and becoming overactive responding to things that are not threats on the dying sense, but still feel like threats. A perceived failure. A risk to identity. A risk to belonging. A risk to being loved. It is strange to realize that my fear of living might not be a failure or risk to live. It might be my brain doing exactly what it was designed to do, only in the wrong situations, at the wrong volume, and for the wrong reasons. Kierkegaard’s “the sickness unto death” — the despair that comes from not being fully oneself. I do not always understand him, but I understand that feeling. The sense that something in me is not being allowed to come into the world. the sense that I am withholding myself from my own life, and that while holding becomes it own kind of pain. Kierkegaard’s soul living between hope and fear, that, feels like the most honest description of my inner world. I can still want it. I can still imagine a life that feels wide and alive. Fear, because to step into that life is to take on the responsibility of choices, and consequences, and the way mine intersects with other lives. Sometimes I wonder if I hold back because I do not trust myself with the weight of my own life. Or because I do not trust the world with me. Or because I am afraid that once I really begin, I will not be able to stop, and I will have to feel everything I have been keeping at a distance. We look at the horizon of living and admire it from afar. We long for richness of experience, depth, and connection. And we fear the very things that make life feel alive. So, is fear the opposite of living? Or is it simply part of it? Perhaps the work is not to become fearless, but I must try to become someone who can live while afraid, someone who can keep showing up anyway. Again and again in the full complexity of the heart. Risking being hurt because the alternative is a life closed off from sensation and dreams, that feels like a kind of dying to oneself, like a slow erosion of something that still wants to be born. I am afraid of living because it matters, and the tragedy, my darling, is to never dare to be alive in the first place.
Yours in thought, Yana.