Fear. Mark Edick

going back to school at the age of forty-five and thinking how scared I was of what might or might not happen. My fear ran amok. I asked myself, “Will I be accepted? Can I handle the classes, or am I too old to learn? Will my grades be good enough? How will I pay for everything?” My fear-generated list was nearly endless, so I broke it down. First, I decided to enroll. Then I took one class. That went well enough, so the following semester I took two classes. Soon I was a full-time student carrying a 4.0 grade point average. Eventually, I graduated with honors. It was a process, daunting when I looked at it in one big chunk, yet manageable when I broke it into smaller pieces. I actually broke each semester into weeks, because I found that at the beginning of each semester when I got a syllabus for every class, the amount of work seemed overwhelming. Fear appeared like a ghost and told me I would never get it all done. As I broke things down into weeks, I saw that I could easily do what needed to be done a week at a time. I eventually broke things down into a daily schedule, which made my workload even more manageable. The fear, which started out looking like Frankenstein’s monster, began to look more like a simple household chore when I began breaking it down into smaller tasks. The work of going back to school finally became enjoyable as I integrated it into my daily routine. I made learning a process—a set of steps to follow in order to achieve a goal—and it worked out very well. Since then I have found that everything is a process. Everything can be broken down into manageable chunks. Learning to do even this was a process; it wasn’t easy, but it is possible.

      It took patience and practice, but life is like that. What I practice today, I become better at tomorrow. My goal now is to make every day a practice session for the future. I practice learning so it will become habit. I practice overcoming fear for the same reason. Habits are easy to follow, and dealing with fear can become a habit if I practice it often and if I break it down into a process. It too can be done, and more easily than I ever imagined.

      Here are the steps I take nowadays to deal with fear: first, I recognize the fear at a conscious level; I acknowledge it and even mentally shake hands with it. Then I look fear in the eye and tell it I will not let it govern my life, that I plan to do exactly what needs to be done to attain my goal. Then I break the task down into smaller and smaller pieces, breaking fear down as I go, until I discover that the task is not only doable, but also enjoyable. When I reach this point, I almost always find that fear has left the building or is cowering in the corner.

      Then I remind myself that fear will return, and I will need to deal with it again, because fear is like that—it’s just part of the process.

      I have come to believe that fear only exists to be conquered. Sure, I know the fight-or-flight response to fear, the gut reaction to that nagging feeling that something isn’t quite right, that something is terribly wrong, or that I’m in a dangerous situation. By conquering fear I mean not simply taking the gut feeling and running with it. What I mean is taking the time to stand up to fear and thinking it through before I act. Often this means stopping and taking time to think, feel, and get to know myself in order to recognize that I am afraid. Then I take time to stop again to give myself an opportunity to think before I act.

      Sometimes it is prudent to run. If my life is in immediate danger, running is the most likely option. Since that is rarely the case, I have found that more often it is better to stand and face my fears, to think things through, and then do what I decide is the right thing to do, no matter what fear tells me I should do. It may be the more difficult thing to do, but it gets easier every time I do it. Practice makes progress.

      I have a fear of heights. My sister asked me if I wanted to go skydiving. My first reaction was “Are you crazy?” But after I thought about it, I went. We did a tandem jump where I was securely attached to a skilled skydiver, who had made thousands of jumps and wore a parachute attached to his back. It was hard to jump from an airplane 13,000 feet in the air, but I did it. And you know what? I still have my fear of heights. When I stand at the edge of a ten-story building, my gut still jumps into my throat. It doesn’t bother me as much as it used to. One skydiving attempt did not remove my fear of heights. It only shrank it a little.

      I am sure it would subside with more work, but I have made a choice. I have decided, at least for the time being, that I will not be doing more work on this particular fear. Jumping out of airplanes isn’t something I care to do again anytime soon. But I’m not ruling it out, either. My sister loves it. She even got my mother to jump—it was my sister’s second jump—and she asked me to go again. I declined. But I didn’t decline due to fear. I declined because I had something else I wanted to spend my money on at the time.

      The next time my sister asks me, I may just go. I know it would be fun. It was fun the first time I jumped, and I know it will help me deal with my fear of heights. In the meantime, I’ll keep working on things a bit closer to the ground.

      02 | Anger and Depression

      In my experience, anger and depression are two insidious ways the cunning entity known as fear disguises itself, and as we know, disguises are often intended to conceal the identity of someone or something that wishes us no good.

      But anger and depression are two feelings I can easily recognize if I am paying attention. Therefore, I do my best to watch for these two emotions, and when they begin to rear their ugly heads, I look for the fear behind them. Sometimes it is easy to identify the source; other times the fear is more elusive. Yet I can always hunt it down if I am diligent in my quest.

      Sometimes I must get more honest with myself than I would like. I must face some facts about myself that I don’t want to face, and admit that I am afraid of something I would not like to admit—even to myself. But it helps me locate the core of the problem, which helps me find a solution. Today I’m all about solutions, so I’m willing to make the admission, at least to myself. After all, I want life to be enjoyable. I despise being angry, and I dislike feeling depressed. Therefore, I have spent a lot of time looking for ways to defeat these two thieves of my time and life-energy.

      Depression

      When my first sponsor died in 2006, I fell into a mild depression. I call it mild because it seemed moderate for losing someone who had been such a tremendous help to me during my early years of recovery, someone with whom I had become so close. Someone I loved. As it turns out, it was a rather mild case, too. I cried only once. As I look back on this time, I can see that my grieving was reduced by the fact that he was old and his death was imminent. However, the greatest contributor to the mildness of my depression was the fact that we had a wonderful relationship. We never argued, we did many things together, he taught me a lot about staying in recovery and about life itself, and I truly loved him.

      While death is a permanent loss, I knew he would live on with me, in my heart. Still, there was depression, albeit mild considering the occasion. I stopped to look at the reason for the depression. This was a case where it was easy to identify the cause. I had lost a great friend, but it didn’t stop there. The fear ran through me because I was uncertain of how life would go on without my sponsor. Whom would I turn to when I needed to talk? Who would provide me the advice and love that I got from him for five years? I had doubts about the future, and fear took advantage of this by slithering into my being and rocking my foundation. I had another sponsor lined up, but the fear of losing something I didn’t want to lose rode me hard, and the fear of not getting what I thought I might need in the future cracked the whip to egg my fear on.

      I was amazed at what happened next. The grieving process was short and disturbed my life very little, even though I was distressed over the loss of a loved one—the one closest to me outside my immediate family. However, I had identified my fear, and I had discovered that I really only had to grieve for my loss and my fear of filling his shoes because of the wonderful relationship we had over the years.

      While it may sound as though I am making this process of grieving rather simple, it was even simpler than I expected, and fear took advantage of that, too. For a time I was concerned that I wasn’t grieving properly. I thought that maybe I had lost my ability to grieve properly or that I was growing cold-hearted. My sponsor was my first close personal loss since entering recovery, so this was new turf for me. Then I got an email from a friend