What makes me tick,

and in some cases, what prevents my ticking. I have a number of fears, phobias and psychological tendencies that I have picked up over the years. I believe some are just my nature (my astrological nature) and some have come from earlier experiences. The past couple of days have taken my entire bag of issues and dumped them all into my lap at once. So, I thought that to get a better grip on reality and bring myself under control that it would be helpful to explore them.

Fear of abandonment - I have an incapacitating fear of abandonment. The thought of being left, of having no one makes me uncontrollably hysterical. I become a completely different person - irrational, blabbering, sobbing, even prone to stalking.

Fear of being alone - Along with being abandoned I fear loneliness. It is not being alone that I can't handle, I often enjoy being by myself and I actually have only a few close friends and don't always spend time with them regularly. It is the possibility of never having someone to be with me always and to share all of my (and their) experiences.


Fear that I am unlovable - I don't think very highly of myself and I have a hard time imagining that others would either. I tend to look for love in all the wrong places. I read once that we seek out the love we think we deserve. I don't know if it's true or not but for a long time I seemed to most want the love of those who could not or would not return it.

Fear of failure - Making other people happy is something that has been important to me since I can remember so I attribute it to my being a Gemini. I was an odd standout and also completely overlooked as a child and sought the approval of those around me to feel accepted. This is no different than most children I think, but I seem to be overly sensitive to the rejection and plane indifference of the people who were important to me. I wanted to do everything as perfectly as possible. I needed to be perfect at everything that those people saw as important or worthy. I thought that if I were then they would certainly love me and be proud of me and that would make me happy, but if I failed the opposite would happen. This childhood fear has followed me into adulthood and although modified, it has not decreased. Likely, this is also why my first instinct is to assume that things must be my fault and my responsibility to remedy.

Fear of a personal dooms day - A mountain from a mole hill, a monsoon from a dew drop... choose any similar metaphor. I will always assume that the worst thing that could happen to me is probably happening to me. Chronic stomach ache, must be Krone's Disease; haven't heard from someone, they must never want to speak to me again; low score on a paper, I'll have to repeat the class - maybe I should just drop out and get a low paying full time job...you get the picture.


Fear of lies/dishonesty - In an earlier post I explained that my childhood was full of dishonesty and lies. After having seen the kind of people and relationships that created I have a grave fear of the same happening to me. This is a large part of why I make significant effort to always be honest with people but I have no control over whether people are honest with me. I don't assume I am being mislead, quite the opposite in fact, I tend to give people the benefit of a doubt even when I probably shouldn't. This makes it all the more traumatic when it does or I think it has happened.

Fear of my own vivid imagination - If there is any artistic gene in me at all it would be a story telling one. At one time I considered a career as a writer and thought that I could even be good at it. However, this ease at which I can spin a story together in my head is a most dangerous thing when combined with this list of fears. In some cases, like this week, every one of them can play a distinct part in my emotional self destruction. I can take a string suspicious findings and other unsettling circumstances and weave together a narrative that is nearly a decade long and concludes with my heart run over by a convoy of 18 wheelers with snow chains on their tires, completely alone and unable to trust another person for the rest of my life, which would mean to me that a family would be out of the question. As well as, my want of a good life to share with that family would be so unrecognizably destroyed that on my best day I would be little more than a functioning minimum wage worker at a job I hate and with no one to go home to but a tiny apartment above a garage full of garbage and an even tinier dog.


I hope more than anything that this turns out to be a dew drop instead of the monsoon I fear.