2/30: Fears, Tonight’s Thoughts

To know what I'm talking about, read this.

Describe 3 legitimate fears you have and explain how they became fears:

1) I’m pretty freaking scared to death of spiders. I’m not really sure where this fear came from. When I was a kid, there was a huge banana spider outside my bedroom window and I wasn’t afraid of it. Now, if that happened, I’d die. I don’t know what changed to make me scared. But oh boy, I am! I have too many scary spider stories. I can’t even type them cause they freak me out. Some of you have probably heard them. Please note: I just typed some key words about them to explain how horrible they are, but got too freaked out and deleted it. A friend of mine convinced me to let a tarantula climb on my arm (for moral support – she wanted to for a specific reason but needed someone to do it with her and because I love her so much, I agreed). Fortunately for me, she never got it set up, so I got out of it. Thank goodness. I probably would have had a heart attack and died. Just talking about this gives me the heebie-geebies! I think I need to take a shower after typing about this…

2) I’m scared of crazy bridges. Not just your normal, run-of-the-mill bridges. I can handle short ones or straight ones just fine. The ones that get me are the super long or super curvy ones. For example, most of the on-ramps for Beltway 8 in Houston freak me right out. I have to focus on my breathing and tell myself repeatedly that I’m not going to die. For some unknown reason, I always think that something is going to happen to the car and I’m going to lose control and careen over the edge of the bridge and die. It’s kinda horrible. I also always get just a bit anxious when I drive to Galveston on those long bridges. It’s not too bad, but I am a little hyper-aware on bridges like that. The worst example of this was when I was driving to Florida. There’s this huge bridge through some swamp in Louisiana. It’s something like 50 miles long. It takes an hour to drive on. Nothing but swamp for miles and miles. I couldn’t help but think about how the bridge was surely going to collapse and then we’d crash into the water but we wouldn’t die in the car – we’d be able to get out but then we’d have to swim to land, but that wouldn’t be for another 20 miles so we’d definitely either drown or get eaten by alligators. And with my luck it would be either my mom or my niece that got attacked first and then I’d have to fight off the gator and…and…and… So many horrible things went through my mind the first time we crossed it. The second time – it was even worse. EW! I’m never driving on that bridge ever again.

3) I’m afraid of leaving this life and it being like I never existed. I’m afraid of being forgotten. I’m afraid that when I die hardly anyone will be at my funeral. I’m afraid that there will be no mark left behind because of me. Now, I know that these things won’t happen. But my fear of being irrelevant drives a lot of what I do with my life. I want my life to have meaning, not for my own benefit, but for others. I want to do things that influence other people for good. I want them to feel the love of God because they knew me. I want to help them in their hard times. I want to life them up and give them hope. And if I’m successful in doing that, I don’t have to be afraid of my life having no meaning. In some ways as I’m writing this I feel incredibly narcissistic. But mostly I realize that because I value helping others so much and want so badly to do that, I’m afraid that I will fail.

In other news...

Today I had a cool experience. I got to observe some Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy. I’ve been really interested in this model of therapy for a while, have read a book, seen some videos. But I’ve never seen it live until tonight. It was SUCH a good session. Amazing things happened. I could not believe how much progress I saw in just one session. I already thought I wanted to use this model, but wasn’t completely sold yet. After seeing tonight, I am 110% sold. I loved it! I was glued to it! I cried, I laughed, I thought deeply. I can’t say enough wonderful things about this session. A lot of people may say that emotions don’t matter that much. I don’t buy it. They matter so much. Beneath everything, there is an emotion that affects us. We learn to ignore it and deny, but it’s there. And when we let it out – oh man! That’s where the magic happens. For various reasons, I almost didn’t go tonight. I am SO glad I did. My experience was invaluable!

I also took the MMPI today. It’s a personality assessment. It’s 566 questions or something ridiculous like that. It took me an hour. I thought my hand was going to fall off. Seriously. It was insane. Don’t ever take it, unless you enjoy the feeling of immense pain in your hand from meticulously filling in over 500 stupid little circles til you go crazy.

Also – I’ve been boycotting Glee since the episode in the Fall about the characters all having sex. I don’t think we should encourage sexual activity in teenagers. Some may disagree, but I feel pretty strong about it. However, my sis and I found out that Matt Bomer was going to be on last night. We absolutely adore him. Like, I’m fairly positive he is the most attractive man that has ever lived. So, we gave in on our boycott for one night. And let me tell ya – it was the best decision ever. Matt Bomer on his own is pretty fantastic. Add him singing and there is just nothing better. If you didn’t see it, you should look up the song he sang on youtube, Somebody that I used to know. SO GOOD! I love me some Matt Bomer!!

Night!!