Identifaction Factoring In Via Fear of Failure

[Guest guest]

Dearest Friends,

 

 

I want to share something with you, something that only Linda, my

Beloved Friend, and Bob are aware of, and it's that I went/am, sort

of, going/gone through a most "can-I-do-it" review of my ability to

write. I don't know if you noticed that the poetry stopped flowing,

the posting started slowing, and the writer's block got cement-hard

so quickly, I didn't see it coming. Who ever does see "what's coming?"

 

I was in a writing/not writing crisis for awhile, and then I stopped

fighting it, allowing whatever was coming up, to just come up. And I

examined this most deeply, completely, and I recognized that it was

arising from the old identification to my fear of failure. When I was

young, after the onset of JRA, I adapted to the hostile-perceived

world by adjusting my views and my communications. Everything I did

was under-written by the need to never fail, for failure meant that I

had nothing, was nothing, could never be loved, always would I be

rejected, always would those whom I loved and trusted, leave me,( a

belief adopted after having felt and entirely believed I was

disposable and rejectable because of the responses to my disease and

how it presented.)

 

I believed that if they rejected my body, in essence, rejected me,

then the only thing I had left to offer, the only thing I could 'be'

in order to be loved, was my mind, my intellect, my cleverness, my wit

and humor, my talents, my writing and artwork, my hobbies, anything

that I could 'do' which might bring others around to the

ability to love me, for I thought that my attributes and my talents

and skills were the only thing that could possibly make me loveable

and non-rejectable.

 

My body/me was obviously rejectable and non-loveable,

for hadn't the world told me so, and kept telling me so by

the cruel/thoughtless treatment of people, of children, peers, men,

women, friends, relatives, everyone lump-summed-up in leveling me to

the ground of feeling/believing/being myself as worthless and a

nothing and nobody that anyone wanted to love, could love, should

love, and even like?

 

It struck me down, the JRA, just as I was starting to find "I Am,"

just as I was beginning to gain confidence, becoming a pre-adolescent

with a strong sense of myself, talented and loved by the others at

school and at home, and when suddenly I was ill and in

incomprehensible physical and emotional pain,

was being kept out of school, swollen, inflamed, and

disfigured by the disease, unable to walk like the others because of

my hips and knees distingrating and fusing bone together due to the

cartilege being eaten away, unable to brush my teeth or hair, or wear

shooes that were normal-width due to enormous swelling of my little-

girl feet, I lost all confidence when my friends and

peers turned away, turned on me because of their inability to

confront or understand the disease and their fear of it and what it

had done and was doing to me.

 

I knew and had seen a girl in our neighborhood who had a disease,

perhaps elephantiasis, and it scared me to death to think that I was

now as frightening a spectre as she had been to me, as at mercy to

the fears and ridicule (not me, I never, ever ridiculed anyone with

disease or disfigurement,) from peers and people, as she ... and I

was so filled with fear because it wasn't stopping as they had

promised it would do at about age 12 when puberty set in, and the

pain was so enormous I thought I couldn't take it. They gave me only

aspirin in those days, and the huge amount caused tinitis in my ears

that never, ever stopped. It couldn't be plugged-up earred out, it

couldn't be wished away, so it stayed day and night for years upon

years.

 

You have probably noticed that whenever one is 'different with

disease,' that even though someone might feel compassion, might wish

to talk with them, might long to approach them kindly, might want to

convey the feeelings and expression of "you are the same as me,"

something happens, something arouses great fear and as it

arises, the one then feels unable and inadequate in approaching

the one with the disease and/or disfigurement. They feel that they

will be unable to know what to say, or even how to say it if they

feel it and know it.

 

Death and disease scares people, scares them to the point of being

uanble to communicate or relate openly with the one having the

disease, or with the one dying. Try as they might, want to as they

might, the fear overcomes the longing to express love and kindness,

and the mind closes up and the loving cup does not get passed --

the past has once again had its rending and rippling effects become

the veil which keeps them far away, imagining safety in distance,

and it manifests as this imagined distance and delay of loving

communication, and it shows itself in avoidance and alarm --

 

The long arm of the past appears, and it is a death-knell to helping

or approaching, to openly Loving, the ill friend, or the dying

friend, and it gongs the death-knell to helping oneself cease

and desist from the being held back by the secure grasp of the past,

the memories and associations attributed to the fear of facing

anyone/anything associated with disease and death. This idea arsises:

If they can get a disease and if they can die, God, oh God, so can I!

Avoid it! or so says the ego-entrenched identification to a doer and

done, (could be done) to-er.

 

But this writing block fear was seen for what and how it began, and

in that, this news: Today I finish, and polish up, and print, and

then send in the manuscript I'm submitting to a writing contest from

the Helen Keller society of friends.

 

It's about how one (me,) overcame/is overcoming, a mental,

or physical, or both, affliction and what it did for them (me,) to

achive/be achieving/understanding this. I wish me luck, great luck,

and I know that you do, too, Beloved Friends. Good Luck to God, the

actual form which is Love, I Am ... this Love in action unleashed

from contraction! Grace! Determination and Vigilence to What Is.

 

 

I'm not trying to suggest an easy answer, like

"there is no me it belongs to" or

"it doesn't belong to anyone, so all is cool."

 

I'm encouraging a real look into the confusion,

and the entire sense of an inner being

which could be involved in the confusion.

 

That inner being is only evidence of psychological fear,

and that fear is something that makes things seem

to belong to a personal being which has its

own life to itself, it's own "inner being."

So, what good does it do to hear that there's

an ordinary mind with no second-guessing?

 

There is just this, as is, to look into.

 

Right now, just this way, as it is."

 

~ Dan Berkow

 

 

 

 

Love & Peace,

 

Mazie