I Fear

 The following are things that I fear on a daily basis. Not things such as barfing, or clowns, or things flying around my head. This isn't about my absolute fear of being trapped in a butterfly conservatory with a bunch of barfing children and having clowns as tour guides. These are completely different fears, and if my last sentence didn't scare you off, and you choose to keep reading, you'll see what I mean. I think they're regular fears we've all had and continue to sometimes battle; I'm just in the mood to voice them.

I fear change. For someone who likes the thrill of the hunt, and likes experiencing new things, I really hate any change to the life that I know & live on a daily basis. I take it personally when someone moves a piece of furniture. I fear building a really great life around me, and suddenly having it stripped away.

I fear losing friends. I have some really, really awesome friends. I say "really, really awesome" because I honestly have no idea how to describe them any other way. Any attempt at describing them using sophisticated, yarn-spinning language wouldn't do justice, so i might as well just use really lame, mundane words, because at least they're absolute and true. But seriously, I have a really great group of friends who are some of the most amazing, down to earth, fun people I know. I fear losing that, because as you get older true friends become harder to find. I like surrounding myself with positive people; people who don't have an agenda.

I fear gaining weight. Now, this probably sounds like something most people fear, right? And of course it is. But I really do drive myself crazy sometimes fearing that I'll gain back all of the weight that I lost 2 years ago. The biggest difference isn't in new found confidence, but in how much better people treat you when you aren't overweight. I don't get weird looks in the gym. People hold doors for me now. I can go eat somewhere without condescending looks. And most importantly, random people talk to me, because they magically view you as a worthy, self-respecting person the second you aren't fat.

I fear my anxiety coming back. It came back. It came back in December after being gone for over 2 years. It's kept me from doing things in the past, and I fear it'll have the same effect in the future. I fight the anxiety demon regularly, and it's not as bad now as it was in December & January, but it still lingers. I went on a date with a girl to Tim Horton's a few weeks ago, and my anxiety took over the day before and made me feel very nervous, which made me not feel good. Not feeling good lead me to get even more anxious about possibly being sick, which nearly kept me from going on the date. Whilst on the date, I probably spent 75% of the time talking, because I felt if I didn't talk I was going to puke. We never went on a second date.

I fear not being cool enough.  Cool is a really silly word. It's an elementary school word that has sort of hung around like a bad smell and is still a word in everyone's vocabularies today, aside from it being "cool outside." I don't know if anyone is truly cool, or what defines cool, but I guess I fear not being as interesting as other people. I fear that others are doing way more exciting things than I am. While I'm catching up on the latest episodes of Rick & Morty, I sort of just assume that everyone else is out having a beer with someone awesome, or just generally living an interesting life.

I fear not meeting a girl. Sounds mushy, is sort of mushy, so I won't spend too much time on it. But it's true though. I'm a 20 year-old guy who has spent the vast, vast majority of his life single. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing. I'd rather not be in a relationship than be in one with the wrong person, but at times it really does start to become a bummer. Being single can be fun and exciting, but there's nothing wrong with finding a really nice person who compliments your personality, and having them as a regular facet in your life.

 I fear doing nothing/not being relevant. This sort of comes from the cool point, but I really do hate not doing anything. I did nothing for a whole year when I dropped out. Then I did nothing but tennis and sports and shit for two years, but at least I was doing something then. I just really hate feeling like I'm not contributing something either to the world or to myself. I could take a train to downtown Toronto with a few buddies, hang out downtown for the day, grab an amazing meal, then hit a pre-game festival and take in a game. I can train it back, and arrive around midnight. The second I sit down at 12:10am and realize that I'm not doing anything, I begin to feel that itch, despite the fact I just spent a day downtown enjoying life. The second I'm not doing something, I worry that means I'm not relevant, or not exciting. The second I'm not preoccupying my brain, I begin to try and think of ways to preoccupy my brain.

I fear a lot of things. These are really only a few prime examples I could think of at the moment, but they're major players in my everyday life and thoughts.

So let me ask, what do you fear?

From The Couch

The couch that I'm writing this from is the same couch that I've been stuck on for the past 5 & a half weeks. It's a couch that I've had a lot of time to sit on and think. It's a couch that I'm probably going to avoid when I get out of this cast in  5 days.

When I broke my ankle 5 and a half weeks ago, I really didn't think I broke it. I got up, feeling embarrassed that I took yet another spill while skating, and prepared myself to keep on going, and to fall again. Instead, I stood there, both skates on the ice, wondering why the pain wasn't slowly getting better, and why it was so much different than any minor tweak I had experienced before.

I stood in the same spot for a couple of minutes, then finally decided to try and skate it off. I skated to the other end of the rink, but every time I put my right skate down, it felt a lot more wobbly than it had just a few minutes ago. I finally got to the boards and stood there for another few minutes, until I decided to test out my leg. I lifted my good leg, and magically, I couldn't feel my right leg or foot anymore, and almost went down.

Fast forward now past me getting off the ice, going to the hospital, having a nurse laugh at how I stupidly injured myself, and the doctor coming in and telling me I broke my fibula. I'm on crutches now, in a tenser-wrapped splint that eventually became an air cast.

Five and a half weeks have gone by since then; and in that time, I've really had no other option but to stay at home when I'm not at school, and sort of just wait for the time to pass.

Before I broke my ankle, I would usually go out somewhere after school. Whether it was for a short drive, or to pick up a friend, or just to find somewhere to go, I went. I'd try and avoid coming home at all costs, not because of anyone or anything at home, but because I don't really feel comfortable with the idea of facing my thoughts, and not having something to occupy my brain.

In being stuck like this, I've had no other choice but to be stuck with myself, which has brought on both good and bad. It's good, because it's good to confront things that make you uncomfortable. It's good to push yourself, and hope that you can get past that certain thing weighing you down. At the same time though, it's been tough. I've had periods where I've felt like I lost all of my determination to get better, or to work on school, or to interact with anyone. At times, I've felt like all I want to do is sit and think about how much I hate being like this.

I've also had to learn how to plan ahead, but also to focus short term as well.

While in the past I feel like I've had a good mix of these, they were sort of on different terms while being non-weight bearing in a cast. In the long term, I had to plan ahead what I'd need in the hours to come, so that I could have it close by, or how I'd do something on crutches, or get somewhere on crutches. At the same time though, and almost for the exact same reasons, I've had to learn how to do things very short term as well. When you're on crutches, you're sort of at everyone's mercy. You can't drive, you can't carry things, and you really just can't fend for yourself. So you sort of need to plan in the now when you know that someone has a free moment.

And while I'm on the topic of people, I really can't understate just how appreciative I am of everyone who has helped me. I've really become extremely dependent, and so many people have been there to help me out, and have made this whole situation that much easier. Especially my mom, who has basically become my driver everywhere, and has helped me so much at home.

I joked the night after this happened to someone that I went from watching "how-to" videos on youtube of how to skate, to watching how-to videos on how to use crutches on stairs, and that I had sort of gone full-circle. I suppose in another sense I've gone full-circle in that I was planning on blogging about being a 20 year-old learning how to skate, to now possibly blogging about my rehabbing process.

Anyways, I just wanted to share those few thoughts on what has been going through my head these past weeks. I've certainly gained a larger appreciation for walking, and for those who still continue to work and actively do things despite a major disability.

When I see someone else on crutches, I'll happily go running to help them out...that is, when I can run.

Thanks for reading.

Restarting

I would like to start off this post by saying that I have anxiety issues.

Anxiety.

There, I said it. I said one of those words that so many of us are afraid of, myself included. We're scared of things like OCD, and depression, and anxiety (just to name a few). And I think we're scared because as humans we're naturally control freaks to a certain degree. We have these bodies that we're in, and these brains and hearts and other organs that function, and with that we sort of assume that we should be in control of them at all times. By admitting to having some sort of mental illness to that degree, we sort of admit that we don't always have that control, and that's scary.

Anxiety is wading. It doesn't just leave and go away forever. It's this demon that you sort of have to battle, and it improves, and gets worse, and really just goes through the motions depending on what's going on in your life. I've had dark times where my anxiety crippled me to a point where I didn't want to do anything, where I came to terms with the fact I was this anxiety ridden misfit who wouldn't accomplish anything because he was scared of everything. I've also had the polar opposite where my anxiety hadn't touched me in months, and that was the case up until recently.

A lot of my anxiety is caused by a fear of feeling ill, and by fearing that, I end up feeling ill as a result of the anxiety. Now, I hadn't gotten sick in quite a few years, three years in fact, so my anxiety about that had gotten to a point of near non-existence. But that came to a grinding halt recently when in the first week of December I ended up getting really ill, on top of having one of my best friends leave for two years, in which I can have very little contact with him. It sort of came out of no where, and I soldiered through it, but it sort of brought back that anxiety because it brought me back down to earth about the fact that I can get sick, and it reminded me of just have damn awful it can be.

I'm also a part time germaphobe; a word which my computer refuses to recognize as legitimate, but it's real. That germaphobia made me really crazy about things at one point about 2 years back. I had gotten rid of some anxiety, but I replaced it by constantly hand sanitizing, and just not even touching things while being out; I became Howie Mandel when he actually had hair.

So as I was saying, I got sick, I also got better. I was super ill the Friday it started, and by Saturday I was already eating lots of crackers and going through quite a few water bottles. But I knew that once I got better, the creeping fear of getting sick would come back. Thing is though, it wasn't so much a fear of getting sick again, as much as it was the fear of fearing getting sick again.

I've said this repeatedly, but I'm a big believer that the #1 issue within anxiety is the fear of having the anxiety. You enter such a dark place when you're going through the anxiety attacks, a much darker place than when you're sick with a 12 hour bug.

So I've been struggling. I've been struggling with the reemergence of my anxiety to a degree, and somehow trying to find a way to get past that. And I write all of this stuff not for people to go "Oh, poor you" or anything like that. I don't want that, I don't like people feeling sorry for me. I'm typing all of this stuff because I feel it's important to make public one's issues with mental illness. Even if it doesn't spur someone else to go and write about their issues (snowball effect), it does show people that there are others out there dealing with these issues, and that they're not alone at all.

I also take this comfort in writing. It's like a warm blanket for me. Maybe because I'm keeping my fingers moving while my whole body wants to crumble under the pressure of anxiety. Maybe because by making my brain process everything, it helps it realize that we all deal with these things, and that this is just one instance of it.

But I really take comfort in it, and I can't even explain properly how much having the ability to write means to me.

I've learned that I really know myself. I know myself to a very deep level that I trust my gut on almost every first gut feeling I get. I know what I like, I know who I like. But what I struggle with is understanding myself. While I may know things, I don't really understand how or why I am a certain way, just as we don't understand why others act a certain way. I sometimes feel like I'm a total stranger to myself, because (like with the onset of anxiety) I can go from one guy who has the whole game working for him with no worries, to this guy who is having regular anxiety attacks again.

I also know what I want to be, but I can't understand why I have such a difficult time accomplishing getting there, being that person. I like who I am, I really do. When I was in high school I didn't like myself, and therefore it made it hard for others to like me, because I was always molding myself to what I thought everyone wanted me to be, but you can't please everyone. So in the course of being out of school between leaving school and entering college, I really learned to like myself and appreciate who I am and my journey. At the same time though, I really wish I could care less about things like getting sick, like how others treat me, like different relationships and hardships I carry.

But alas, I am who I am; and maybe that's one of the biggest keys to happiness and learning not to care so much, is just total acceptance. Maybe we need to accept that we aren't always in control of our thoughts. Maybe we need to accept that we aren't always who we want ourselves to be. Maybe we need to understand that sometimes, we just don't understand; and that's okay.

Understanding and accepting are two totally different things. But if you can somehow understand AND accept that you're an ever evolving person, thrown into this world with other evolving people, maybe we can come to terms with the fact that perfection isn't a reality.

Life is this beautiful mess of screw-ups and accomplishments. It's punching your fist into a wall out of frustration, then in the future punching the air like Tiger Woods when you just accomplished something you never thought possible.

I need to get back to embracing those lows, because I know more highs are on the way.