What’s the worry…
More email sorting and answering. Along with reading Allen Shawn’s Wish I Could Be There: Notes From a Phobic Life. I envy his passages of carefully written autobiography, although I suppose memoir might be the better word. The bits of confronting his phobias contain an emotional power that echoes deep within me. I’ve noticed an intensifying agoraphobia in myself as I’ve grown older, problems with crowds that can send me into a dissociative fugue. And there’s some way that it’s coupled in my mind with the the fears of contact that accompany things like lapsed correspondence, email or otherwise. Contact seems fraught with the unknown and threatening possibility of being overwhelmed and annihilated.
It brings me back to debt: owing someone a letter is like owing them anything else; if I’m not careful a simple exchange can become a burden almost impossible to discharge, freighted with anxiety and dread. Today I’m trying to work my way through it all bit by bit. It has helped me to acknowledge that September, the beginning of the school year, was a time where a lot happened in my life, and that it’s not unthinkable that I wouldn’t be able to handle all of it. Now that some of the pressure is easing, I can turn my attention to what I neglected in the midst of that. The truth is that I need some way to say “not now but soon” as things arise, so that people aren’t simply left hanging, and I don’t spin out into my abyss of guilt and fear.
Tags: anxiety, daily photo, debt, emotions, night