If I ever leave this world alive

That’s the definition that I used to always use for fear. Maybe it was to simplify it in my mind, and make it less intimidating. There’s something comforting about taking a feeling that is so profound and labeling it as something that is all in your mind; completely under your control. The thing is that I don’t actually think that this definition applies to fear. It applies to apprehension (which, unfortunately, doesn’t make quite a succinct and aesthetically pleasing acronym). In fact, I would say that there are only a couple of times in my entire life that I’ve actually felt fear.

Fear isn’t in your mind. It isn’t something that you can control. You can’t label it, you can’t alter the way that you experience it. It’s biological; a defense mechanism. In our quest to stay alive in the wild, as animals, we are programmed to feel fear in the face of things that threaten our ability to further our species. Most times, this applies to us when we face death. Being afraid is meant to awaken something in us that can take over completely. It makes us momentarily stronger than we ever thought possible, faster than we can comprehend, and ironically, braver than we thought we had the capacity to be. When faced with a threat, as animals, we feel fear so that we can go outside of ourselves to avoid danger.

But humans don’t live in the wild. Humans live in safe, neat, tidy little houses shut away from basic natural threats. We are sentient beings; so devastatingly self-aware, cognitively and intellectually focused that we’ve adapted our capacity for fear to include threats to our emotional wellness as well as our physiological being. But because our unconscious has made expanded our capacity for fear, our intellectual mind has expanded the word itself to apply to experiences that actually don’t exemplify fear-appropriate situations. And instead of letting fear serve it’s intended purpose, to bring us out of ourselves, we find a way to let it manipulate us further into selfishness. We make being scared such a pervasive emotion that it is easily avoidable. In other words; we mislabel emotions so that we can have an excuse to hide from them. 

So let’s call it what it really is:

•  ”I’m afraid of being rejected”= “I’m insecure and not emotionally sophisticated enough to deal with rejection.” 
• “I have a fear of performing in front of people”= “I am not comfortable or confident enough in my abilities that I can rely on them consistently, and am consequently aware of/uncomfortable with the negative judgement I may be receiving from others.”

This isn’t to say that I don’t feel these feelings. I do, and they can be all-consuming. But every single emotion that you feel that isn’t a direct result of impending threat to your emotional or physical well-being is simply a result of some deficiency that you have as a person. It can’t be fear. It’s having knowledge of your shortcomings. It’s apprehension knowing that avoidable negative experiences could befall you. Oftentimes, we’re too weak to look our inadequacies in the eyes and accept them. It’s so easy, so convenient, and so comforting to say that we fear them as if we could do nothing to prevent their arrival. As if they will be of substantial harm and should requisition us pity instead of indifference. Here’s the thing about living, though. It doesn’t take very long, and there isn’t much time. We choose the paths in which we invest, and we make life decisions that will render us weak in some areas and strong in others. No person will ever be without apprehension, and no person will ever be without discomfort. As avoidable as it may be in theory or in hindsight; it is, as a feeling, a central and unavoidable part of the human experience. The best that we can do is accept what we aren’t (fully and without question), prioritize individually, and invest in avoiding the apprehension that we would find the most devastating. 

When you accept that this apprehension is a direct result of your inadequacies, it’s much easier to control it. Instead of letting it consume us and weaken our abilities (going inside of ourselves as if nerve-wracking situations will disappear if ignored with enough vigilance), we should put fear into perspective. Most of the things about which we feel this apprehension will not kill us, no matter what their negative effects may be. So think about how your life will be different should things not turn out how you’d like. If you don’t end up dead, dying, or endangering the life of another: it’s wholly biologically insignificant. So remove apprehension as best you can, and just DO with the best of your ability. Apprehension, which we feel in the face of not being our best or happiest, ironically only serves to weaken us and hinder our performance.

It’s easy to say, I know; it’s significantly more difficult to put this into practice. But the most important lesson that we need to remember is that FEAR is outside of ourselves. It’s unavoidable, and it directly threatens our emotional or physiological well-being either directly or indirectly. Everything else that you’ve labeled fear is entirely inconsequential. So live, be your best, and don’t make excuses to cover up your self-induced deficiencies.

There are several categories within myself where I feel like I could be more satisfied or fulfilled. In the hopes of tackling them more exactly, I have separated every weakness that I consider within me into one of 4 broader goals. They are:

1.) Emotional happiness and spirituality

2.)Well-rounded intelligence and consistant intellectual curiosity

3.) Physical well-being and balance

4.) Creativity and artistic motivation

And although I define them as separate, I believe that they are all intrinsically intertwined and actually have no discernable boundaries between them. So while I separate them for the benefit of focusing on individual problems, I envision them as one. The image that I’ve used to represent all of them, and everything else in my life, is a tree. They serve their separate function, but operate as part of a greater whole. But more on that later.

First, number 4.

I am a musician. I am other things, but my official intended functionality in society will be as a musician, and as one who teaches music to others. I am currently studying music in a music school, and have greatness consistently demonstrated to me with the mindset that musicians only get better in the presence of something greater than themselves. And although I believe that this is true, I also believe that without a certain inner desire to be better INDEPENDENT of the talent of others, being shown greatness will only serve to sink us further into indifference. 

Passion is only one part of this process, though. You can’t create passion where it isn’t. And I don’t have passion for every part of music. In fact, I think that my greatest weakness in my growth is that I can’t feign passion or excitement for material about which I feel none. Even if said material will enhance my development in areas that do excite me, I can’t force myself to make connections between these things; and end up doing just what I want to, and no more. This is why I believe that greatness and excellence will always elude me. I lack self-motivation. I can’t leave my room and go practice just because I should, and believe me, I’ve tried. I can’t make myself do it, and I end up just doing other things instead. I can practice when I must, and only when I must. So I’m trying to change that. 

I’m a saxophonist. Saxophones are notoriously jazz instruments, whose greatest defining and individualized characteristic is their ability to make loud, hip, dirty, amazing sounds. No other instrument can do what a saxophone can. It is perfect, I think, for me; and it makes me so happy. I, however, am not a jazz saxophonist. I am a classical saxophonist, for the most part. And it’s not because I like classical music better than jazz, because I certainly don’t. It’s because I spent so much time not doing fundamental classical work that I had a lot to catch up on when I got to college. There was no time for jazz playing, and to be honest, no thought. There was too much going on. So I got behind in my jazz, and I found that I lost that part of being a sax player that  every person understands and loves about sax. So now I’m in a frantic dash to catch up, but what I’m finding is that my passion for this kind of music, which is great and central to my being, can only go so far. I have music and soul in my heart that I don’t have the technical or physiological ability to express. So now I have the time and the desire, but I have frustration as a looming and foreboding roadblock. 

The most obvious and present of my jazz inadequacies lies in my improvisation. It’s not screaming, or cool, or even relevant at a menial level. It’s just incomplete, nervous scales. So I bought some jazz books, and I improvise by myself. I try to be confident and indifferent to the world… I try to play what I hear and feel. And I can’t. But something has been on my mind today, and it’s that improvisation isn’t something that I can just categorize and define and conquer. It’s a process. Things that I can’t generalize and define clearly in my head scare the shit out of me. I have a working library of the world, and of emotions, and experiences, and knowledge. Improvisation doesn’t fit into this library. And that’s because it parallels a central part of life in general; you can only do so much preparation, but the unexpected is what defines living. This music, that I strive to create out of nothing, is how I will put myself into the world. It is my soul, my heart, every feeling I’ve ever had, vulnerable and exposed and out there for every one to interpret. And it scares me that I can’t really ever prepare for it or understand it, I just have to do it for my whole life and get it a little better each time. And what I do isn’t wrong, or bad; I’m just not at the point where I can play ME through my instrument. I can just play scales. 

So there’s no more being afraid. I will do whatever I like when I improvise, and I won’t care if it’s “correct”. Because correct isn’t cool, correct isn’t me, and most of all, correct is too  damn definable. Improvisation is the most important part of music to me, because it IS music. It’s MY music; raw, and perfect and awesome. And maybe I’ll embrace the improvisation of life a little more. Do a little less planning, have a lot less fear and hesitation. Do what is me, without any question. Nothing more, nothing less. Jump at opportunities, make the most out of them, and learn from the good and bad. Improvisation is living, living is improvisation. 

Is all that I want out of my life. I never realized until I was out of the fog how dull and indifferent I was to myself, not to mention the act of living. I’m not saying that I’ve conquered my problems, or that I’m satisfied completely with my life. But what I am saying is that every second that I care about getting the most out of my life, I’m not wasting time. 

When I was in middle/high school, I wanted love more than I wanted anything in the whole world. I wanted someone to be passionate about, someone that I could devote myself to completely. I feel a lot, you see; almost too much sometimes. The idea of being everything to someone, of being able to share every bit of love and passion I had, was literally everything to me. The thing about wanting something that badly is that desire can blind you to reality. This time that I wasted wanting something I didn’t have could have been spent on figuring out who I wanted to be. My indifference to actually developing myself as a person created a lot of insecurity.. and I think people sensed that. I didn’t have a boyfriend, a serious, real, long-term boyfriend, until the summer before my senior year of high school. Peter. He wasn’t great. He was funny, and nice, and kind of cute.. and he was cold, and awkward. He was small and angry looking. He didn’t ever talk. But he liked me. And he looked at me like I was the world. So I fell for him, and after years of dancing around it, we started dating. I was his first kiss, he my second. We had sex for the first time, and it was awful. No romance, he was just rushing to lose his virginity before his parents got home from the grocery store… but nevertheless, that’s a connection that you can never replace. The first time you have sex, it matters. So we got into a grove. He went off to college, I finished high school, and we rued our tortured long-distance relationship by crying and holding each other like everything in life would be perfect if we didn’t have to be apart (that’s a wonderful thought to have, and it makes everything seem so simple, after all). We were irreparably in love. I was determined, almost competitively, to be in this perfect relationship. We never had a fight, we had sex a lot, we went out on dates, we talked. And I looked forward to not having to have love hurt me, like it hurt everyone else. My love would be different. I would have a love story unlike any other. We spent all of our time together, we shared every aspect of our lives. He changed colleges so that he could go to school with me, and just like that, we were this perfect college couple. Adults, almost. The thing about college, though, is that it’s different. Your whole life has to be about connecting with other people. And I didn’t. I spent all of my time with Peter. People in my school knew me as “the girl with the boyfriend”. I never hung out, went to parties, did anything really; and people gave up trying to include me. I shut myself out more, just because of how awkward it was to feel like I was out of the loop. I was an adult already, in my eyes; temporarily stuck in a stage in my life that required me to deal with children who didn’t have the stability that I so treasured. I was blind. And I was sad. I cried a lot, and I put Peter on this pedestal in my mind that identified him as the one perfect thing about my life. I hated school, and I didn’t try. Neither did he. We hated our lives. But we loved each other. It’s almost like being tortured helped us to think of our relationship as the perfect thing, and of everything else as broken. 

And we went home over the summer. I lost a lot of weight, and I noticed him pulling away a bit. He blamed it on his discontent with his life; he had no direction. He didn’t know if he wanted to keep going to college. I helped him. I tried, I did. I talked to his parents and convinced them to keep paying for his education, even though he consistently failed classes and made no effort to work or do anything productive. He watched TV. I campaigned for him, and I convinced them to let him live in an apartment, because maybe dorm living was the problem. And we went back for our next year at school. We did couple things and went out on dates, talked about love, had a 2 year anniversary. And he started getting weirder, about everything. He was miserable about school. And we met up to talk one night. 

I wasn’t worried, we had never fought, and we were constant. He was stability to me. He was the most central aspect of myself. He defined me. 

We sat on a couch, outside of his class, and he told me that he was disgusted by kissing me. That sex made him nervous. That he always felt bad about sleeping with me. He said that he wasn’t sure if he loved me any more. I cried. So much. I felt like a failure, and in an instant, the most sure and stable part of me crumbled. And after he told me all of this, he ended by saying:

“and I think I might be gay.”

But he still wanted to try and work it out. I agreed. I just wanted him to hold me, because he was the person who comforted me when I was sad. And that’s when I realized, that night, after he left, that he was all I had. I had cut literally every other person out of my life in favor of more time with him. That pain, that cutting, real, and out of nowhere pain, was debilitating. Especially because I realized that I didn’t even know myself without him. I just didn’t know how to comfort myself, because he was my comfort. I had to face this ugly, insecure, lonely, and miserable stranger head on. Hello, self, I think it’s time we got to know each other. Or not. I needed someone to comfort me. So I found a guy who had hit on me all through my freshman year of college, and I told him what happened, and something started. It distracted me, and it was good. But Peter was technically still my boyfriend, so I asked him. Are you gay. And he was sure. Within a couple of days, that was it. And I realized that it wasn’t me, that our breakup wasn’t because I’m not worthy of him, it’s because he was biologically incapable of loving me. But he was still my best friend. We still talked, and we were happier than ever. We were meant to be best friends. And this other guy… well, turns out he had a girlfriend. All I wanted was to jump into a relationship, because it was SAFE. And I couldn’t. So I was lost, all over again, but it was the best thing that could of ever happened. Because when you have no one else, you need to be ok just with yourself. And I realized that I needed to learn how to do that. It hurt, and it wasn’t that simple. There was a chunk of time when I literally could not be alone in a room for more than 5 minutes. I had to be with someone, laughing and interacting outside of my own mind. 

So for a while, this went on. Until I saw Peter texting at dinner one night, and asked him who it was. It was a boy. From Texas. Peter’s new fling. I was happy for him, because he was my best friend. But it hurt that he hadn’t planned on telling me, because I told him everything. So I pulled away a tiny bit, and reconnected with a crush from high school. I went to visit him, because he lived about 4 hours away. And the feelings were instant. So we saw each other twice, and I slept with him. It felt so right, to be moving on in little ways. I was disassociating individual parts of my life from Peter. And I told Peter. He was happy for me, and we were great friends. I was still having a hard time, though; I was sad. I cried to him. And one night, I wanted to watch movies and eat ice cream with him. And bond, and talk, and figure things out. So we planned it out, a couple of days in advance. And he bailed, to talk to this guy on Skype. I was alone. 

That was suspicious. And I asked him, finally, if he had been talking to this guy for a long time. 

Yes.

And I had to drag it out of him. But he admitted it. For 2 months of our relationship, he had been telling a man thousands of miles away that he loved him. He had been masturbating over webcam with him, while sleeping with me. This wasn’t him dating, this was him cheating on me. Him knowing he was gay and telling me I was the one he wanted more than anyone else in the world. So he told me that every time we had talked about forever, he was never sure. And he said “I love you” just to say it.  This was my world, and it was gone. He not only didn’t love me, he didn’t even care about me or respect me as a friend. I was garbage. And he treated me like total shit. And that’s the instant that I knew I had to change; this could never happen again. I had let a person define me to the point where they felt like I was theirs to just toss around and use for their own selfish needs. I became someones property. That is so sick, so inhuman. 

So he and this boy, so in love, became each others everything. And I got to the point where I just couldn’t pretend like the past was resolved and all was forgiven. So I told him: “You fell in love so quickly, and without any regard for me.” And now, he’s not there. He’s alone in this world, with no friends; just his boyfriend. And I changed. 

This is my journey. This is me being the happiest and the most complete that I’ve ever been; but not that I will ever be. This is me opening myself up to people, and love, and life, and not being afraid to be hurt. This is me cutting the poison out of my life, and surrounding myself with real and meaningful experiences. If I could express in words how much has changed for me over the past 6 months… it’s indescribable. But I’m working through things still, trying to define them, and I’m living as myself. I’m living with the mindset that time to think about things and be by myself isn’t feared; it’s treasured. So here I am, in my room, alone. That speaks for itself.