Fear

"You have nothing to fear but fear itself."

This is a concept I have been trying to remember a lot more lately. Although I hide it well from most people, those who really know me well, know that I can be kind of a high anxiety person. New situations make me nervous, sometimes even to the point of feeling sick to my stomach. Both in my current job and the former part-time job, I had to call in sick within a couple of weeks of starting due to stomach bugs, and I'm sure that my nervousness of a new job was a contributing factor as well. I have anxiety about a lot of things. Saturday, Sunday, and Monday it was over working part of first shift in addition to part of my usual second shift(Saturday I worked 11:00am-11:30pm, Sunday I worked 8:30am-9:00pm, Monday I worked 1:00pm-9:30pm - a big part of why I haven't updated in a week); yesterday it was nervous about student orientation for interns, which further overwhelmed me and made me more nervous than I already was - a 30 page paper involving our internship? A biopsychosocial assessment? A checklist of things we should look at involving the organization we're interning at? I don't know how much of this my field supervisor at the agency knows about what I'll have to do this semester, considering when I got accepted she simply said I would "be in charge of 2 or 3 clients", whatever that means. And considering I start Thursday, but somehow she thought I was supposed to start on way back on the 6th, I'm a little apprehensive.

But why do we have fear? It can be a great thing when it's protecting us from something dangerous, like our prehistoric predators or jumping off of a building without a parachute. But a lot of times it just gets in the way, it seems. Keeping us from finishing school, applying for that job we want, walking up to that cute stranger who could or could not become our soulmate. What's the point of feeling things that hold us back from our potential? In my case, why does having had a stressful childhood that led to high anxiety, have to affect me now? Where's the faith?

Maybe someday these questions will be answered. If not, there's always Xanax.