My Mortal Enemy
A Dark and Haunting Fear
It will come over me suddenly; sweep over me and possess me before I realize what has even happened. I only know that I feel a sudden sense of oppressive gloom, a fear I can barely tolerate.
My dark fear is my mortal enemy and my best friend. My fear has lived with me always every day of my life; my fear is me. My fear is not really mine, though; it is my mother’s; but my mother and I were very close, and I became, at an early age, unable to distinguish between the two of us.
My mother was terrified of me; terrified of my giftedness and my sensitivity and my artistic inclinations. She taught this fear to everyone in the family, including me. Going through life hating oneself makes for a very strange existence. One can never win in such a situation, because one can never escape oneself.
My fear today comes from the fact that I am putting together a newsletter for a group I am in. I could die of the fright of this undertaking. I have managed to work on it one little bit at a time, but as I get closer and closer to finishing it, my fear is becoming paralyzing.
The dark cloud came over me a couple of hours ago, and now I am unable to think straight or do much of anything. I want to run; I want to get out of my apartment; but the days are ticking by and I need to tie this thing up. I have other things to do as well, like looking for some gainful employment.
What happens is that things I find to be scary, based on my mother’s teachings, tend to become her. And so the newsletter has become a dark, looming, terrifying thing to me, as terrifying as my mother herself.
I hate my mother for twisting my mind and distorting my reality to the point where I can barely function. But what I need to do as I endure these episodes, is learn to distinguish reality from my mother’s twisted distortions.
I need to understand that the newsletter is not my mother; that I am no longer in my mother’s house; that I am not the same as my mother. I need to slowly define who I am; and understand that I am a very different person than she taught me I was.
I have to find a way to guide myself through these periods of dark fear; to remind myself, gently, who and where I really am.
My mother’s fear is dark and haunting. I live now in a small, dark apartment, a place in which I am enveloped and penetrated often by the noise of other people. This noise, which right now, is in the form of a deep, thumping bass sound of the stereo below, triggers that ancient fear of mine; the knowledge that I was trapped in my mother’s house and that there would be no escaping for a long, long time, if ever.
These episodes of fear take me back instantly to those dark, foreboding, interminable years in my mother’s house.
