I just had an apostrophe!

I just had an apostrophe!...

Not so very long ago I told a very dear friend, "Any choice you make out of fear, or based on fear is a bad choice!" Don't get me wrong, we as human beings are hardwired for that whole 'flight or fight' thing, that fear response that allows to act as we ought in times of genuine peril. However, we as modern homo sapiens don't have much to worry from the average saber toothed tiger or stampeding wooly death; we are advertised to and dictated to about just what we should in this day and age fear. Anthrax, Arabs and republicans oh my! All faceciousness aside, we are told to be on constant look out for the guy with a bomb or the sinister folk who would steal our credit card numbers and identity. Not that there are not men with bombs or the near epidemic problem of identity theft. What I'm saying is, we are not only told, but strongly encouraged to fear and to make choices (especially purchasing and voting choices) based on those fears, real or imagined.

I don't like being afraid.

Thanks to the many challenges of the first twenty or so years of my life, I have spent at least that many years in a near constant state of fear. I've only recently (as in the last four or five years) come to realize what a prisoner I was to my own fright, how limited I was not only in my perceptions and beliefs but in my actions and behaviors. It's hard to have fun when you're scared out of your wits, it's hard to make reasonable, relatively unbiased choices when you're terrified.

Fear is a biochemical mechanism that exists in every one of us that has a pulse, but fear, is also a choice. We as higher order mammals with gargantuan frontal lobes and opposable thumbs can CHOOSE to give in to that violent twist in our stomachs and tachycardiac tatty of our hearts. We can choose to force reason onto our frantic thoughts, we can insist on breathing deeply and regularly when every impulse is to breath quick and shallow and saturate our muscles with the much needed oxygen and adrenaline. I know this to be true because in some respects that choice, made well and in crucial moments has literally kept me alive, when I might not have been otherwise.

I just recently enured a rather heinous five days. I honestly thought I had had some sort of stroke or cerebral infarction or even had encephlomyelitis (swelling of the brain and spinal cord due to infection). I still may have something wrong, but after five days of nearly incapacitating pain and nearly overwhelming terror and worry it finally occurred to me. This is fear. It may have caused a petit mal seizure, it may have been compounded by insomnia, plummeting blood sugar and a manic episode, but underlying it all and behind it all was fear. Fear I know, intimately in fact, fear and I are old friends, go way back. I can handle fear. I have chosen and already, even with the lingering headache and dizziness, I feel better. I have made my choice, and fear can just go shut the door on its way out.