My Greatest Fear (It’s Not Spiders, Clowns, or Putin Coming After Me With a 4-foot Machete).

So here’s the thing.

My partner’s parents have been staying with us for the last two months, visiting from India. It is the first time they’ve seen their son in almost four years.

And it’s the first time they’ve met me: this woman who’s in love with their son, and who has been struggling to be completely herself because she struggles with depression.

There have been cultural differences, to be sure. But none so much as the inability to communicate exactly how I feel exactly when I feel it.

I can tell when his mom is disappointed. I’m sure she can tell when I get depressed. But neither of us have reached the stage in our relationship where we can be vulnerable enough to share honestly how we really feel.

At least not yet.

If I ask if she’s okay (when I can tell very potently she’s upset), she shrugs it off with a lack of enthusiasm so contrary to her personality it’s physically jarring. If she can tell that I’m depressed, she doesn’t say it. Though she does make sure I’m always fed, whether running out the door late to work, or coming home after a night of whatever and asking me to text her when I’m 15 minutes away so the food will be warm.

If that isn’t love, I don’t know what is. And yet the prospect of that love getting pulled away if I were to bare my full self… is terrifying.

I do laugh with his parents, a lot.

I cook food, though mostly it’s his mom in the kitchen cooking morning and night, filling the house with scents of cumin and garam masala, of yellow dahl and rasam and sambar, and–strangely enough–making literally the best enchiladas I’ve ever had, though she’s only seen them made once years ago.

I listen to them as they proudly share their culture with me, telling folktales and histories and funny stories about monkeys wreaking havoc on their university campus.

Together, we go to the grocery store. We go on drives through beautiful fall colors to little Bavarian villages in the mountains. They see the snow.

We eat dinner together every night, and yet I’m so painfully aware of how little they actually know about who I am. And what I’m feeling. And what I’ve gone through. What I continue to go through now.

I never cry.

At least not where they can see.

What do I fear the most, you ask?

I fear truly being seen. Or I fear being overlooked because I finally allowed my voice to be heard and no one was able to hold the space with safety. Or I fear that, despite sharing the most vulnerable aspects of myself with those from whom I most desire connection and understanding, I will be judged.

It’s a visceral pain, and present. It manifests in tingles all along my shoulders, in a twisting in my gut, in a rage threatening to burst through my skin.

It’s a fear born of experience, but also the unknown.

I realized recently that I’ve been keeping an internal tally of receipts for all the challenges I’ve faced in my life so that I can prove to others that I’m not just being weak, or lazy, or foolish. So that when they see me struggling, I can prove to them–clearly and concisely–that my emotions and reactions are reasonable. I’ve tried everything I can, and still I’m facing these obstacles with no immediately foreseeable end. It’s my own way of validating myself for what I’ve gone through so that no one else can discredit me.

I’m sure you see it, don’t you? My fear isn’t reliable. It’s not that others are truly judging me — it’s that I haven’t yet fully learned how to trust myself enough to know that even if they do judge me, I will be okay.

I haven’t yet learned how to express my fury, or how to release my rage. There are unfairnesses in society, in the world, and in my past that I’ve only just been given permission to acknowledge, and I have a right to be angry. We all do.

And yet we hold it all in.

I hold it all in because I’ve been taught to be forgiving, kind, compassionate, soft-hearted, welcoming, comforting, humble, meek. So I pushed everything else out.

I was never taught how to hold the difficult emotions. How to express them. How to allow them to be in my body, why they exist in my body, that they’re just as helpful and useful and important as any of the easier emotions I feel in my body.

I was never taught to love my body, and so I never learned how to truly be in my body.

Instead, I learned how to ignore emotions like anger, frustration, shame, bitterness, or insignificance. It’s not that I didn’t feel them, it’s that I didn’t know how to let them exist within me. I thought they were bad, and so I thought I was bad if I felt them. And so I pushed them away.

Of course, pushing emotions away doesn’t actually make them go away. It just allows them to metastasize until they boil up and out in all the ways we can’t predict and can’t control. Anger becomes resentment. Shame becomes judgment. Insignificance turns to worthlessness, and so the identity crisis begins.

Suddenly, you’re 30 years old and fighting an uphill battle you had no idea has been raging within you your whole life and you’re living with your partner and his parents and trying to get your trauma-ridden shit together while also trying to seem like you have everything under control when suddenly you have a panic attack at midnight one night as you realize how incapable you feel of doing precisely anything at all and you don’t know how to keep going on the way that you have, squashing your voice, making yourself smaller, more accommodating, less awkward, in order to please people who, if they did judge you for your depression, would be very unkind people and you wouldn’t want to spend any energy justifying yourself to those who can’t understand anyway so why are you freaking out it’s not that hard just be yourself it doesn’t matter if they deem you unworthy you’re a strong, compassionate woman and if they don’t understand or can’t understand well then that’s not your problem, is it?

-Deep breath-

It’s not an exaggeration to say that I feel more vulnerable than I’ve ever felt in my life, and yet I feel incapable of expressing that vulnerability because I so deeply fear being rejected for it.

Being vulnerable around people I trust? That’s easy.

Being vulnerable when I don’t know how the people I’m vulnerable with will hold the space? It’s perhaps the hardest thing I’ve had to do in my life.

The beauty of it, I’m finding, is that all my life, my body has held my difficult emotions for me when I didn’t know how to. It’s kept them safe; said, “I know you don’t want these now. But they’re going to come in handy later. So we’ll be waiting.”

I’ve cried hours and hours of grief tears over the body that had to hold so much without knowing why or how; that buried trauma down to the bones because it couldn’t afford to break under the weight of it. Finally, now that I’ve been offered safety, I’ve had the space to be able to explore that trauma. It’s been absolutely terrifying and debilitating, sometimes for weeks on end. But even so, always I’m grateful for the liberty granted to a girl/woman who’s so long feared being seen for who she is that she is learning to breathe deeply now, knowing she’s on the path of freedom.

This week, I finally allowed myself to be seen by me. As a result, the bond between who I am now and who I was strengthened, and I began to encounter something new: trust.

I’ve found now that The Work isn’t about trying to accept whether or not others truly see us, or whether they judge us, or even if they wish to leave us behind.

The Work is about building a relationship of trust with ourselves down to a cellular level, so that no matter who or what comes our way, we know and cherish ourselves so deeply that anything others do, say, or believe could never compromise the relationship we’ve built with ourselves; the wholeness we’ve crafted, the worth we’ve attuned, the hope with which we move through the world.

I have spent much of my life in fear, and I see now–30 years of life, 24 months of therapy, and 3 panic attacks later–that that fear no longer serves me. It’s time for a change. It’s time to show up for myself so that even in my most vulnerable moments, the only sacrifices I make are the ones I intentionally choose myself.

I choose to sacrifice self-doubt.

I choose to sacrifice fear of judgment.

I choose to sacrifice the belief that I need to defend my feelings to literally anyone outside of my own body.

I feel the way I feel, and it’s important and valid and no one else has the right to those feelings but me.

I hope that you, whoever you are, know that for yourself too. I hope you know that you have a right to feel what you feel. Those feelings are important and valid and no one else has a right to feel those feelings but you. Period. ❤