Unlearning Fear (part one)

I wasn’t confident as a kid. I was shy, insecure, the type to get violently nauseous at the thought of causing drama. This anxiety lingers well into adulthood, and many times throughout the day, I find myself wondering where this deep-rooted fear comes from.

An obvious suspect is my early childhood. My mother claims medical trauma. She says I had a catheter forcefully inserted at three years old when I came down with a severe, mysterious illness one night. I was held down by nurses while I screamed, cried, and kicked. From that point on, I was as anxious as a person my age could possibly be, harping on the nonsensical "what-ifs" until I got so overwhelmed that I couldn’t hold back my tears.

I don’t remember that. What I do remember is the fighting. It was near constant and could be heard in even the furthest corners of our tiny apartment. My parents would scream at each other at all hours of the day: shoving, hitting, breaking things, slamming doors. When we were very young, my older sister and I would huddle under blankets, trying to distract ourselves with games or loud music. As I got older, my sister spent more and more time out with her friends, and I was left to tune it out on my own.

My father was the meanest, spewing out insults as if it was as natural as breathing. But I remember my mother’s sharp digs the best, because they were the truth. My father says anything he can think of that will hurt you during arguments. Scathing, yes, but not to be taken to heart. My mom is capable of verbally cutting you down to nothing because she means every word she says. I was terrified of making her angry with me, terrified of knowing what I really was in her eyes. I’m sure this played more of a role in my development, a role that they both avoid crediting.

They officially divorced before I was in elementary school, but got back together some years later. The fighting started to slow a bit as my father fell deeper into his addiction. As soon as he got off work, he would pop a few pain pills, then drink himself into a stupor until he peacefully passed out on the couch. I started trying to hug him only in the morning, when the scent of alcohol wasn’t there to wrap around me. To this day, the smell makes me feel sick.

Back then, my father seemed like an unmoving, indestructible stone. Or maybe a complicated vortex that would suck you into chaos if you got too close.

But lying in that hospital bed, he seemed like anything but. I sat myself in the chair that was closest to the door, as if I was prepared to bolt out at any moment. But the fire in his eyes had long faded.

He looked different. Old. The drugs had aged him terribly, accentuated the wrinkles in his face and sunken in his cheeks. He was pale and skinny and broken, nothing like the man I remembered him being.

I let my mom dominate the conversation while I dove into my phone to Google what he had been diagnosed with. There, in big letters, read:

Parkinson's disease is a progressive, incurable neurological disorder. Research has identified a link between Parkinson's disease and drug abuse.

Progressive. Incurable. And of course, influenced by the addiction my father would never heal from. I nervously bit my lower lip. As childish as it seems now, I had never considered my father capable of dying until that moment. The man had lived through abuse, homelessness, addiction, war. Shortly after my parents split for the second time, when I was twelve or thirteen, my father had gotten behind the wheel intoxicated. This ended in a terrible crash. And he seemed fine, lying there in a scary-looking cervical collar. If anything, happy, considering the amount of morphine pumping through his veins. But now, I was forced to confront the fact that his inevitable death would undoubtedly happen within the next ten years.

Well, not really the fact that it would happen. More so, my feelings about it, which would mean confronting how I felt about him, something I’d successfully avoided doing my entire life.

I wish I could tell you that we talked. I wish I could tell you that I told him everything that was running through my mind in that moment. I wish I could say that my pleading somehow got through to him and was enough to convince him to traverse into sobriety. I wish I could say that we reached a shaky truce, that we started the process of healing our twisted relationship. I wish I could say that everything turned out fine. But that would be lying.

The truth is, I didn’t say much in that hospital room. And when I left, I didn’t say goodbye. That man didn’t feel like my father. He never did.

That was one of the last times we ever saw each other. His presence in my life wasn’t strong, but it faded completely after that. I don’t feel angry about it anymore. It’s hard to be mad after seeing him so weak.

This is the truth about life. Things rarely get wrapped up with a neat little bow for you. Anything in your life can be ripped away at any moment, no time to make peace with it.

Ultimately, that’s what caused the anxiety. It wasn’t the fighting, or the medical stuff, or death, or anything else. It’s the fear of losing something before I even get the chance to love what was lost.