How to save your own life

On anxiety as a block to feeling loved, feeling real, and how I let go of everything in order to get free. I also explain how I believe miracles work. This is the first in a collection of essays.

Hi there, hitting the heart button is a free and beautiful way to support Beinghood and the Meeting Myself Again project, if you want to! Thank you so much for being here 💞

“There must be something like the opposite of suicide, whereby a person radically and abruptly decides to start living, or rescue their own life from destruction/obscurity.” - gabe k-s

I was dying. I didn’t know I was dying. I just knew I was scared all of the time. What no one told me is that living with chronic fear is a certain kind of death. It is a certain kind of suicide, while still living. The individual who lives in this state is not only sucked into the fear trance—often referred to as “anxiety”—but also begins making every decision in their life directed by the fear. If there are openings, the individual will find a way to close them, consciously or subconsciously. Somehow re-enforcing smallness, self-erasure and invisibility brings a shred of comfort.

The individual is unable to truly feel love (the most sustaining and essential force on planet Earth) as a force which is directed towards them, from others. The process of being loved, of feeling loved, brings up too much fear, and over time, the individual becomes numb to this energetic exchange.

In this way, the individual does not feel completely “real”, although this feeling is normal to them and indiscernible—it is more of a “how-I am-ness”. In other words, the individual can imagine no different.

The individual does not know that the giving and receiving of love is one of the ways we experience ourselves are real, as significant to others. The individual does not know that love, beyond feeling good, also validates the existence of relational beings (of which humans deeply are) in a fundamental way.

The individual does not know that for many, “being loved” is not just an intellectual exercise that follows occupying a label such as “friend”, “daughter”, “son”, “mother”, “father”, “lover”. The individual understands they are loved in an abstract kind of way; in a way that comes from drawing symbolic identity-based associations, but is unrelated to a felt sense. The individual does know that they like people, that they love people. Sometimes they really know they love the world—that feels easier somehow—to love things like water, earth, plants, birds, a certain sweatshirt, a stranger even, a song. Easier because it is safer, there is nothing to be taken away. If there is a leaving, it is natural and expected. But the individual is unable to feel the movement of love towards them from other people, let alone to find themselves in the dance of falling in love. Too many fear related blocks emerge.

I can tell it to you like that. Does that help explain how I was living? Let me put it in another way. I am crying in my therapist’s office and the words that exit my mouth are: “I am so relieved I am real to you…I didn’t know it before but I didn’t feel real. And I was dying, I had no idea but I was dying.”

I tell her: “The writing was like a kid, tugging on my pant leg, all the time, begging for attention. And I finally get to be a mother. All I wanted was to be a mother.”