Cynthia Savage - My Biggest Fear - Word Flow Day 4

Cynthia Savage n- Day 4 prompt, biggest fear

Egads, this feels overwhelming for early in the morning. Especially when I spend most waking hours of every day navigating all those fears and guiding others through their own.

I learned something many years ago when I was working for Tony Robbins that has stuck like glue in my DNA in regards to my fear. The course involved breaking ourselves down during the week and coming to the primal question, or fear that each of us had. At first it was a private experience, and then at one point we were asked to share ours within a small group. What shocked me was that everyone had a similar root fear which was basically “I am not good enough and I am hiding it from the world.”

This can be present in varying degrees and manifest as different surface fears and yet this is what it comes down to. I will be rejected, abandoned, hated, judged, shut down, ostracized, shunned, killed, hurt, etc etc. And as I have gone on in my own journey as well as my journey with others as a psychotherapist, this basic fear is consistent in most humans. A fear we do not share with the animal kingdom, whose basic fear is survival. If they are safe and have food, they dont self-reflect or analyze, it is a purely human condition.

So this leads me to my primal root fear, which I first remember feeling when I was about 5 years old, and my kindergarten teacher neglected to give me the little happy birthday celebration on my birthday that they did for the other students. I had gotten dressed up for the occasion, and was feeling so excited and proud for the little paper cake that should have been pinned next to my name on the morning board.  

When it was there, I felt a moment of confusion, then panic, then utter devastation as the morning group check in continued and the teacher said “no birthdays today!”

Heartbroken I wandered around the playground fighting back tears the betrayal as deep as any I have ever felt. Who could I tell? I was too embarrassed and shy to tell the teacher, and didn’t have a close enough friend at the school to share it with and so I held my pain in, the rest of the school day, after school at the baby sitters house, and finally broke down and told my mother later that evening when she came to pick me up.

The next day at school there were apologies and a belated paper cake next to my name, but the trauma had already burned a whole in my fluffy pink heart that I was looked over, unimportant, forgotten, unworthy. I have felt and still feel this is the fear bubbling in my gut my whole life. Discovering that a large percentage of humans feel the same way, has helped. That while being a human being is a lucky and magical experience, most of us deal with this mysterious underpinning of self-loathing.  

These days, I manage it well, but it still comes up again and again and my coping mechanisms will kick in. I do them well, mostly, though at times of vulnerability they crop up like angry blisters that are ugly and oozing and I have to perform emergency triage to keep them from festering.  

These days, dealing with new love, I am triggered hourly that something will happen and I will be abandoned, unloved and discarded. Even though I am not given any indication that that object of my affection will do this, I read into the nuances of his texts and responses to me with the rabid fervor of a teenager experiencing a crush for the first time.  

I have my tool box, my yoga, walking, writing, friendships, therapy, cold plunging recently which for some reason has been the panacea to all my ills, and breath. Breathing and breathing.  

I can not watch the new, nor discuss politics too greatly as the fear that arises starts to feel like the powerless devastation rooted in my early childhood traumas. I am not anesthetized not do I want to be. I want to feel. I love my pain in many ways and it makes me move, and be creative. It can also shut me down and render me inert and completely unfunctional.  

This assignment feels complete and I feel a resistance to continuing. I write fast and dump out what I have to say quickly and am trying not to go back and edit. I know this this is part of my need for perfection, to want to get my point across to myself and to the groups. It is vulnerable and hard to share and again, goes back to the root fear that nothing I do will be good enough.  

And I am choosing to sit with it. Let it be there in black and white and know that my fear and vulnerabilites are part of what makes me human and not AI. As I avoid situations and subjects that tap into my fears this feels awkward and scary so I am just going to keep writing, post it and be done with it.  

My poetry, my prose, my journaling, and all my creations come from a place of riding out this insecurity. When I was discussing this last night with a trusted sister, we were talking about how much the world lives in fear, and the current cult brainwashing in our society that we all see is also rooted in the individuals fear that they will lose out on something and look for others to blame for a perceived sense of possible weakness and loss. So I continue to stay strong in my own fear, and stand in the face of it like a pirate on a stormy sea, allowing the winds and the water to lash my face with my sword at the helm ready for battle. And we are done.