So it’s been a while…for all sorts of reasons: health, anxiety, family, friends, life, commitments…yes, just life. And the guilt is piling on because I know I’m not too fab at this “blogging business”, but I’m trying to remind myself that this is NOT a business, this is for me because I enjoy it (and that is okay, and not selfish, or self-indulgent, or a waste of time – hello and welcome to the inside of my mind…feel free to turn and run right back out the door, I do not blame you for your emergency exit – if I could join you, I most probably would!). So, when I stumbled across the lovely Rebecca’s “The things that I’m afraid to share” post (http://www.fromroses.co.uk/blog/the-things-that-im-afraid-to-share), I found something raw and tangible, a reminder that we are all only human, and that being “only human” is definitely “enough”. And, maybe, just maybe, some of those things that seem so painfully paralysing right now can be put onto paper and break that blogging ban I seem to have unconsciously/consciously placed against myself…

Hands down, my ultimate fear is of not being “enough” – good enough, well enough, happy enough, enough for myself, enough for other people. Sometimes I think this fear is The Fear simply because of its flexibility: it can be applied to pretty much anything – bright enough, kind enough, good enough daughter/sister/friend/student/house-mate/patient/dog-owner…and therefore, it is the PERFECT means of holding oneself accountable. If my ultimate terror is in not being enough, and ultimately a) one can never be “enough” at everything, and b) who’s judging? (I am. I am my own harshest critic), I dare say, I can never really be “enough” at anything, and heck, it’s certainly never sustainable under my standards (cue Miss Perfectionistic). 

My fear of failure and perfectionistic tendencies (that’s a polite way of saying, I think I’m in a complicated relationship with my own perfectionism) have a way of being both my nemesis and a trait to which I know I, at least partially, owe my academic successes. I often wish that I simply wanted to be labelled “perfect,” and that that was the extent of my obsessive reliance on my own self-destruction; it isn’t quite that simple. We’ve been here before, have we not? http://sometimesforeverisjustasecond.blogspot.co.uk/2016/09/a-perfectionists-perception-of-perfect.html This links, oh so neatly – ironic at best, cruel in honesty – to my fear of not being “enough”. Perfection, in the purest form, is unattainable. I know. I’m aiming for something deeper, more fundamental, more intrinsically tied, more rooted in my own evaluation of my self-worth, than simply 100% in a test paper. I am not living under regimented guidelines to be “perfect”. It has never been that neat; "failure" and "perfection" are not one another's polar-opposites... It’s an abusive relationship I’m still trying to manage.

Leading on from the fear of my own mind, is the immense dread of letting other people down. Being admitted to hospital at the beginning of the year was perhaps the most evident means by which I have ever let people down; all of a sudden, I simply wasn’t “happy smiley Yasmin who really is 100% fine”. And that hurt. Take away the fact I spent my days glued to an armchair in my slippers, watching snow out the window and counting down until fresh-air time, I really struggled with how much I’d let other people down. And I still do.

I guess what I’m hoping to one day come to believe is that I was enough, I didn’t fail, and I didn’t let people down. Beyond all that, ironically – or not so, for my brain seems a fan of black and white thinking - comes the fear of letting myself be totally, unquestionably happy. I fear endings. I fear temporality. I fear the fact that anything and everything can be fleeting and fragile. I fear that anything and everything and nothing could happen. With happiness comes comparison, the possibility of loss, the potential to fall…and see the higher you fly, the further that fall. Letting myself be happy comes with the immense guilt of not being enough, of not deserving, of being *cue that word* s.e.l.f.i.s.h…and even in my most carefree moments, that guilt is crippling.

Younger me had a thing for counting. (Okay, so this spanned into many areas of life and had a part to play in some slightly overgrown wanderings.) But for the sake of time, and life being short, and all that, specifically, I had a thing for counting days. Or actually, I’d count sleeps. Everything was carefully measured and planned and worked out in terms of “how many sleeps”. I was always counting, and always counting down. The result? I probably wasted a lot of time fearing time. I was scared of time moving too fast. I was scared of “wasting time”. I hated the phrase “killing time”. I was scared of time not moving fast enough. Oh there we go, the partner in crime that is “enough”.  It seemed, time was both too much and not enough. I feared time running out – in many, many senses. I feared passing time. (I’m writing in the past tense, solely because I no longer count sleeps quite in the same way I once did, not because I no longer hold these fears!). I’ve wasted a lot of time. And gosh, I hate reading/writing that phrase. Ironically, I was so busy counting other things that a lot of time has slipped me by. The future scares me senseless – and I know there will never be a timescale on that one.

And finally, because time be a-ticking, perhaps one thing that scares us all, at least to some extent, is the notion of change. We crave the known and seek comfort in routine – we are, after all, only human. We run our lives along the train tracks of certainty, and well, nothing threatens that stability quite like change. I was the child who feared getting rid of old pyjamas, for sentimental reasons and because, well: change. When my parents got new sofas, I remember 6 year old me sobbing hysterically and begging them to let me keep our old ones…oh heck, I definitely have hoarder potential…Change does, indeed, scare me. But then, at the beginning of this year, it dawned on me that perhaps the only thing more terrifying than change, is no change at all: being stuck in the rut, trapped in routine, and led to believe that the monotony and rigmarole is “living”.

Life is pretty terrifying, but it’s also full of potential. Change encourages that potential to become reality – if you lose too much time to the numbers, whole days will pass you by.

Living is kind of messy, but it’s also all we’ve got. It's work in progress - I'm only human. And that, one day, will be enough.