Reading, reading reading. It helps to keep the fear at bay. Today, I have mainly been reading about civility. Also about partiality, self-sacrifice, common sense morality and moral tribes.
I am writing this before heading to Oxford to begin the first module of my Masters. Why on earth am I so afraid? My best friend said to me, Issy, you're scared of doing a different shift pattern, so of course you are scared. Yes, this is true. I am terrified of anything new. the night before going on holiday I am as anxious and unwilling to go as the night before a seven week work trip to Russia (which, in fact, I enjoyed rather more than any holiday I have ever had the misfortune to go on).
The feeling is of snakes coiling in my gut. Slithering over each other. Not snakes: eels. That repellent slippery sliminess of the eel and its faceless face. Sorry, eels.
The feeling is of a brace around my chest, restricting my ribs and compressing my lungs.
The feeling is of nails in my diaphragm and a strangling hand around my throat.
The feeling is a restlessness combined with deep lethargy.
The feeling is nausea and the desperate desire to eat and drink.
The feeling is of a residual tension in every muscle in my body. When I was meditating earlier, I could feel the 'holding' of all the muscles in my jaw and forehead, around my eyes and mouth. My scalp felt stretched and taut.
Let's did deeper into the whys. Well, there are significant logistical factors that come into play. I drive to Oxford tonight (it's Sunday now) and then do the first day of the course on Monday before driving home to write a script for work. On Tuesday I do the course remotely and at lunchtime send the voice-over audio for my 'real' job. In the evening I drive back to Oxford to do the course in person over the rest of the week. But on Tuesday and Wednesday night I will also be writing some scripts for a different job. I come home at the weekend then do the same again next week before, in a fortnight's time, heading into work to do an incredibly demanding and long shift that - surprise, surprise, scares me. I do that again on the Wednesday before my 'normal' routine resumes on Friday the 16th of October.
So that's one thing.
Then there are the logistics of when and how to get food - both here and there - during this goddam pandemic. Oh, and I won't have time to do my normal exercise. I'll be away from my cats for six nights in total. And on the Tuesdays they'll be leaping on the bookcases and mewing while I try to concentrate.
But the elephant in the room is, well, I'm going back to Oxford. I spent three years there and though in many ways they were the best years of my life - I loved studying English Literature and I had a purpose, a telos, a passion - they were also very hard. I spent the whole of the first year with imposter syndrome, convinced they'd made a mistake letting me in and that I was the stupidest person in the city and the whole of the second and third years trying to live up to the promise I had actually shown in the first year, despite my fears. In the end, I didn't think I'd done well enough. In addition, socially I did find it challenging. I did feel lonely quite a lot and alienated. Desperate too, at times. And at time as mad as a box of frogs. A time of passion and perplexity, of struggle and striving, of focus and frustration. I both long for and dread my return to that mindset.
I am afraid of not understanding and of not keeping up. I am afraid of letting myself down. I am afraid of seeing contempt, boredom or disappointment in the eyes of peers and tutors. I am afraid of being too old. Of wasting my time. Of wasting my money. Of wasting my life, such as it is.
I am afraid that I won't like anyone and they won't like me. I am afraid of feeling angry about the premises and assumptions or the niggly specificity of philosophy, as opposed to the broad sweeps of mind possible in studying literature.
I am afraid that I am not rational. Nor social. Only an animal and a cornered one, at that.
When I applied for this course, I thought I'd have the money from six weeks working at the Euros in my bank account and the freedom to wander the streets and roam through the museums, to revisit wine bars and restaurants, bookshops and parks. But it's not quite like that now. This is a different reality. I do not have my buffer against financial strain and the external limitations are all too familiar to all of us after six months living in corona-world.
And so, I have reasons for fear. They are real reasons.
Always my life is lived on a plain above a steep valley. The vertiginous slopes are always there - one false step, just one false step. Sometimes I can look at the path I travel, walk along as I watch my feet, left then right and left then right, and I make some progress. But all too often I slip and feel the sickening stomach lurching drop to a lower level where I catch my breath and decide whether to keep going on the narrower and more trepidatious path or whether I can scramble back. I often don't have the energy or the will. But to stay on this one, the cliffs of fall so close and so steep, is too risky to manage for long. Yet the attempt to climb can itself all too easily lead to a further gut wrenching slide. It is this challenge, always this challenge. To make do or to try. And who knows what's best? Not Kant nor Mill can advise.
My best friend says, it's OK not to feel OK. Well, in one sense it may be; but in another sense it certainly is not.
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