Book 1, Part 1: Fear and worry make life-long friends with your author….

If there’s a single theme that defined my childhood — and perhaps my entire life — it would be that of Fear. I was a fucking wuss when I was a wee lad. Just terrified of everything, life itself it seemed. The simple fact that I was a living, breathing, somewhat conscious… thing… was terrifying to me. If you ask my mother, she’ll tell you I was literally afraid of my shadow until I was like six years old. And I believe her, because I know, down to my very DNA, that I was a neurotic child.

Now that I’m a 32-year-old man, I can state unequivocally that I’m still basically a coward. Mundane things, like going to work, set off that all-to-familiar fight-or-flight adrenaline rush that usually goes away only after I pee for like the fifth time in 15 minutes. But I can also unequivocally state that, for the most part, my fears don’t petrify me anymore. I just sort of worry about them. I suppose there’s a difference between outright terror and plain worry. Now I just sort of worry about things and move on with life. I don’t experience distilled terror very often anymore. Rarely really. This isn’t a brag of any kind, or a futile show of insecure machismo. It’s just a fact. And it took many years and a lot of soul searching to even make it this far.

These days my fears, as I alluded to, are related to are, I feel, trivial, stupid things. Like, every summer I join a softball league, because I’m a legitimately tremendous softball player when I play for fun. When I’m with friends and we’re just horsing around, trying to hit the ball as hard as possible and laughing whether we are successful or not (especially when we’re not), I’m basically a mutant, comic book monster amalgam of Bo Jackson, Ozzie Smith, Ichiro Suzuki and Pedro Serrano. I’m a goddamned slow-pitch softball prodigy. But when I play in the summer league, I devolve in a slobbering, mouth-breathing, moderately competent player.

I’m scared of sucking. And of looking like an idiot. So I end up either sucking and/or looking like an idiot. That’s how fear works in those kinds of situations. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. When I play for fun, though, there are no such fears, so I play like a God. The mind is free to be free, and it functions as it needs to function. When I’m scared, the mind is subjugated by The Fear. Occasionally I’ll manage a good game in the summer league, despite The Fear. However, the next game, on top of the usual Fear, I fear reverting back to the Elmer Fudd doufus in cleats. And then I do.

And so those are the types of fears I tend to have.

Which isn’t to say, again, that I don’t often worry about things. But worry is different. It’s fear’s underachieving sibling. Fear got all the good. effective genes. Worry is just trying to keep the parents from being so disappointed that they passively “forget” to invite him to Thanksgiving.

Worry is just the act of being cognizant of the potential pf undesirable and unwanted outcomes. Like, you may worry about the final score of a professional football game, but — unless you’re a chronic gambler or one of those creepy goblins who invest all of their life’s meaning and identity into the results of an ultimately meaningless game they don’t even play and whose participants they are totally unrelated and unacquainted with — you don’t fear the outcome.

Mostly I worry about coming across as odd or socially inept around other people, but I don’t know if I fear it.

When I was a child, though, I did a lot of worrying and a lot of fearing. Instead of being mere siblings, though, in my childhood fear and worry were more like Siamese twins. Where there was one, there was bound to be the other. And, as I already mentioned, I was afraid a lot back then, which meant I worried all the goddamned time.

Usually I was worried about death — my own and that of my parents. I was convinced that myself and/or my parents were going to perish at any moment. Usually The Fear would accost me at night, right as I was attempting to induce sleep and its ensuing dream state. I would become so overcome with The Fear that I would literally start sobbing. My mother would have to come sit with me and insist that I had a long, drawn-out, perennially-anxiety-ridden life ahead of me, as did she and my pops. After 10 minutes or so of this kind of conversation and its attendant cuddling, I was usually convinced just enough to be able to fall asleep and to not worry about our respective impending dooms for a week or two.

These episodes reached their peak of recurrence between the ages of like six and nine, but I would become paralyzed with fear from the thought of death on occasion well into my mid-teens, although by then I would just lie in my bed and try not to throw up. No crying or cuddling or reaffirming conversations with my mother. Just sheer loneliness and existential loathing.

Just thinking about all of this now, I realize what kind of a saint my mother must’ve been, as, even through have to deal with me and all that recurring nonsense, I’m pretty sure she still not only loved me, but that she also liked me.

I think.