The Bear Behind Me

I've been filled with a lot of anxiety lately.  I'm not quite sure of the exact source, other than there has just been so many things that have gone wrong in our family over the past several months and just a lot of things going on, in general. Maybe it's just that I'm getting older by the day and don't handle things as easily as I did in past years.  I hate to think that that is the reason - I hate thinking about getting older, at all, but I am, and I feel the affects and fears of aging more often than I care to admit.

Chris has his top surgery scheduled; he will have it done in January.  I keep meaning to find the time to sit and really talk about the details of where it will happen and exactly when.  He has told me the doctor he will be using, but even that is not something we have discussed at length.  I think this is probably the core of my anxiety right now, while I go along as though I am dealing with the reality of it all.  I know he must be scared, and yet he seems confident and happy, and so I guess that is why I don't probe or push the discussion.  I know I need to, but it is only at this moment right now that I am really exploring my feelings about Chris having top surgery.  As with so much of what has occurred through the course of this past eighteen months of Chris's transition, I tend to push subjects away to some place behind some wall that keeps me from having to really deal with situations.  I become just involved enough to know what is going on, but not so much that I have to digest details or deal with unexpected emotions that might surface or potentially overwhelm me.

People tell me all the time that they appreciate how strong I seem.  If they only knew of how I have learned to mask my insecurities and fears behind my actions.  I go through a million motions that keep me in motion and offer actions that suggest support, involvement and sometimes even guidance, but beyond the motions are untouched subjects and unaddressed feelings and questions ... sleeping like some bear in a cave where no one is aware or can see.  I am a master wall-builder.  I learned it from the time I was really little when things seemed wrong in my world but I could never quite define why or how, and so I'd build walls to protect myself.  I believed, as a child, that there was something wrong in my world but there was nothing wrong with me.  Hence the walls ... to protect myself from real things that hurt me - and from perceived things I imagined could hurt me.

I'm going to find time to talk to Chris about his top surgery and other things I feel we need to discuss. Maybe then, some of the anxiety will lift if I let the bear out of the cave.  I can easily convince myself that strength is built on bricks and mortar of the walls I place between me and adversity, but my heart truly knows that strength comes when you allow those walls to crumble, because it's in those wall-crumbling moments that you are forced to face your fears head on.  And maybe the person I would be with the bear beside me, instead of behind me, would be more of what Chris needs to survive than the pretend me that offers support in disguise ...