"What if you woke up today with only the things you thanked God for yesterday?"
What if, indeed. Religion is a pretty conflicted topic for me, but I do believe in God, and I also know I can be a fantastically ungrateful person. I spend so much time dwelling on the negative things happening in my life sometimes that I don't stop to appreciate the good. I'm trying to work on this, but unfortunately, it's never as easy as a quick decision.
People I know keep telling me, for example, how brave it is that I decided to give living in Boston a six week shot. But it doesn't feel brave to me. Now, nobody said bravery comes without fear -- in fact, these people argued that point pretty well:
"Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear."
- Mark Twain
“Bran thought about it. 'Can a man still be brave if he's afraid?'
'That is the only time a man can be brave,' his father told him.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones
“Before I knew you, I thought brave was not being afraid. You've taught me that bravery is being terrified and doing it anyway.”
― Laurell K. Hamilton, Blood Noir
And, really, who am I to argue with these (published!) people? But I thought bravery should at least come with some kind of confidence. Aren't people who take risks supposed to have at least deluded themselves that there's a chance they'll succeed? If I were brave, wouldn't I feel excited right now, a calmness, or some sense that this is right?
What is bravery, anyway? How do I get some of it? Is bravery feeling like you're out of options, like you're so scared of becoming everything you see around you that all you can do is run? Is bravery slipping out of Pittsburgh's back door into a city you've claimed to love since you were in high school but now feel a sort of gurgling fear of every time you consider that you aren't going home? It doesn't feel brave.
Actually, I've never felt brave. It's not really a word I use in my vocabulary; it's an ideal I associate most with epic tales or soldiers or people who seek out some sort of justice to correct a moral or legal wrongdoing.
That said, I've often wondered what it might feel like to be brave. I imagine it involves some sort of meeting things head-on, an active drive or ability to push yourself. I don't push myself. I duck and cover, tuck my head down and wait for a moment of quiet when I can slip in. I like it when people give me instructions -- not orders, but how-to's. I like to put my head down and just do until it's all over. Even though I know I'll feel helpless when I'm not racing to the end of something.
I have anxiety, or had anxiety, depending on which of my therapists you ask. My most recent psychologist, an assertive, grey-haired Republican who intimidated me, would insist that I say "had."
"We can fix that," he said, when I called him from my mom's kitchen some afternoon last summer. His voice was clipped, confident. Certain, but dismissive at the same time. Anxiety was Tuesday to this guy.
Still, I had no other options, really. No one else was taking new patients, at least not anyone who wouldn't push medication on me, and I've always been a strong believer that I'm the only person who can fix me. So that rules medication out. I'd spent the night previous laying on my back on the floor of my empty apartment, staring at the ceiling, watching the fan blades cut through the heavy summer air, and having no idea what to do. Those are the moments that scare me the most: those times, at the start or end of a day, when I have no plan, when daylight is shifting but I'm suddenly utterly certain that I'm completely alone.
I used to love and look forward to alone time. I still do, I guess, but only pseudo-aloneness -- the quiet chance to breathe amidst a storm of chaos. It's when I feel like the world is empty that the anxiety creeps in. I would never survive a zombie apocalypse. I wouldn't even want to.
People around me are much more confident in me than I am. Most of the time, I feel like a great pretender. I fall into things, I don't make them happen. Someday, somebody is going to catch on. And I'll be there with a sarcastic crack and an eye-roll, just so you all know I knew it all along. I might fool other people, but I don't fool myself.
So, Ms. Anxiety, why move to a city where you only know a few people, none of them closely, without a job or tangible reason to be there?
The long answer is this: it's felt like something I wanted for such a long time that when a reasonable time and means of doing it came up, I just had to. This is crazy hard, emotionally taxing, and so stressful that I wake up convinced I've made a mistake every morning. But I'm doing it anyway, for myself, and nobody else.
I know a lot of bitter people. So many people I went to school with are married, have kids, houses, divorces, and no dreams of getting out or ambition to make those dreams happen. And that's okay, because that works for them. But it seems so impossible to me. I don't know that I'll ever have one big dream, but I have a lot of small ones. Maybe they won't pan out, but no one can say I never tried, or that I sat around while life just happened to me, while I blamed everyone else for my own unhappiness and tried to take everyone else down with me.
I run away from myself every day. I have to stop doing that. I have to get to know myself, stop letting other people tell me who I am or should be. I can't do that in Pittsburgh.
The short answer? Oh, yeah. I have no effing idea what I'm doing here.
But I guess I'll find out.
Oh -- and this:
