#500wordsaday: I'm Not Afraid Anymore (spoken like Kevin McAllister)

1) A time you lied
2) A time you were hurt
3) The last time you were happy for a week straight
4) Family
5) How you wish you started your day (and then why you aren’t doing that already)
6) Your most authentic moment
7) When you really loved yourself
8) When you were scared
9) Why you long for love
10) Something about you that you’re hoping people don’t notice   / Something about you that you’re hoping people do notice

500 Words a Day: When You Were Scared

A time I was scared?? I don't know...I can't think...

**fast forward 3 hours**

According to one of my girlfriends, I have writer's block on this subject because I don't scare easily. Which is true; aside from monkeys and outhouses, of which I have real fears, I just don't find myself all that afraid, all that often. Plus, I have written several blogs about facing my fears, overcoming fears, and the likes...so I felt that to make this a different post, I really needed to think of a specific moment of being afraid, not a general fear.

But I still can't think of one. Because I have writer's block, hence why I needed this blog challenge to get my wheels turning.

**fast forward another hour**

It's no secret that several years ago, I found myself smack dab in the middle of an abusive relationship. After he smacked me in the face with a Tupperware plate only a few weeks into dating, somehow I was moving into this guy's apartment, then buying a house with him, cooking all of his meals, raising his daughter, and living in a shadow of what I used to think was my life. It was weird.

It's still weird, after a lot of time and a lot of therapy. I'm the opposite of the "type" of woman who gets abused by a guy. I'm tough. I'm strong, confident, and stubborn. And at that time in my life, I was also controlled, manipulated, and bullied. I made decisions out of fear, constantly on edge and trying to avoid starting a fight. I was certainly not myself.

There was a summer when we were together, that two of my cousins were getting married, just a couple weeks apart. Of course, being the typical abuser, my boyfriend hated my family and didn't want to attend either event. We compromised though, and he agreed to attend the first as my date, and that the second - in which I was the Maid of Honor - he'd skip.

Clearly, I actually think not attending a wedding with your girlfriend makes you an absolute douche bag, BUT at the time, and in my state of mind, this seemed fair enough.

So the day of Wedding #1 arrives, and I am really excited; I borrowed this sexy vintage wrap dress of my mom's that I worked out tirelessly to fit into, and I am so excited that he's finally coming to something with me. I spend an embarrassing amount of time getting ready, curling every one of my individual ringlets so they're perfect - even though I have natural, bouncy curls - and perfect my makeup. I come bouncing out of the bedroom, ready to go, expecting that he's ready and waiting for me - as any decent man would be.

He's in basketball shorts on the couch, watching basketball.

"Are you going to get ready? We need to get going in a few."
"Nah, I'm not going...there's a Lakers game on."
"But...you said you'd go with me to this wedding."
"I don't want to."

My obvious disappointment is showing on my face, and I get upset; I find myself practically begging him to take me - my family was waiting, I was really excited for him to come (who the fuck knows why). And now 10 minutes from go-time, he literally is like, nah.

Angrily, he throws on slacks and a shirt and walks to the car, as if I have somehow done something wrong. I blindly follow and get in the car, and am already pulling up the directions to the church in my GPS before he's even out of the driveway.

We've not quite made our way from the house to the freeway, when my gut signals my brain in a way that I can't quite explain. You know the feeling you get when someone is following you in a dark alley? It's like that. A sort of light-headed, uneasy feeling, like all I want to do is dive head first out of the car. I don't say a word, just sit patiently and still, letting the GPS in my phone direct us from the southbound freeway, over the Fremont Bridge into downtown Portland. He's been yelling since the freeway on-ramp. I'm ruining his life by expecting him to miss this basketball game. I clearly hate him and want him to be miserable. He hates me, his daughter hates me. I'm fat and ugly, and I disgust him, and maybe if I didn't have these horrible tattoos he wouldn't be so embarrassed to take me out on a date or to a wedding.

And while he's yelling at me, I'm just sitting in the car, listening to the GPS, trying to keep myself composed. No reason to cry, no reason to yell back - that will only make it worse.

"You need to turn right at the end of the bridge."

And in a second, he went from yelling at me, to a white-knuckled, brow-furrowed silence. Because you know, repeating GPS directions is a clear no-no. As he aggressively flipped his blinker, I flinched, and with that, he snatched my phone out of my hand, and from less than a foot away, threw it - full steam - at the side of my head.

From the second the hard plastic hit my temple, I didn't move an inch. He didn't say anything else, nor did I. I picked my phone up from the floorboard, and we sat in dead silence, with the exception of Siri's voice, directing him to the church. My heart was racing, my lower lip trembling, my eyes staring straight ahead; I don't think I even blinked. My throat was dry, and my thighs were trembling, until finally he pulled up at the curb about a block from the wedding venue.

I don't know exactly what came over me, but I practically leaped from the car. The second his foot laid on the brake, I had my purse and cell phone in my hand, and slammed the passenger door in his face, and was halfway up the block before I exhaled the breath I'd been holding for what felt like an hour. I didn't turn around, didn't look back, just walked as quickly as my inappropriately high heels would carry me towards the church, as he drove towards Vancouver, probably seething.

This was a turning point in our relationship, as I could no longer deny what was happening. I was being abused. I had just had a cell phone thrown in my face, and had then been left on the side of the road in downtown Portland, by my boyfriend, who I had been scared to get into a car with. This was a moment of true domestic violence, of which I was an obvious victim. I knew, walking into the church, that my family knew something was wrong. But I still didn't say a word. And I still had a great time at the wedding, danced all night with the groomsmen at the wedding (and considered going home with any one of them, if just to prove a point), and got incredibly drunk before getting a ride home at the very end of the party, in the wee hours of the night.

While the fight we had when I got home was far more heated, far louder, an far more physical, it was nothing like the part of the evening where I was stuck in the car being verbally assaulted by someone who was supposed to love me. I wasn't scared at home, fighting, being slammed against the front door. I wasn't scared of that, because that was routine in our house. It was far scarier being stuck in a vehicle with him, while part of me wondered if he was considering driving it off the side of the Fremont, just to avoid me getting to spend time with my family.

This would sadly not be the defining moment in our relationship, where I would realize I could never make it better and needed to leave; that moment was still more than a year in the future; but this was a defining moment in which I realized I lived with someone I was afraid of, and whom I deeply hated. I would never ask him again to attend an event or party with me; we lived essentially separate lives from that night forward, two people in the same house, who rarely even made eye contact unless we were fighting.

Ideally, I would never have met this guy, and would never have fallen victim to a manipulative narcissist, but several years later I can at least look back confidently. I know I suffered a lot, tolerated a lot, and was bullied a lot - but I did learn to always stand up to what I'm scared of. It's easy to think of things that scare you, or moments you were afraid of something - but what really matters, is that you are able to overcome it all.

And that you don't allow your fear to keep you from forging ahead. #nofear

Don't Let the Monkeys Run Your Life

I'm scared.

Of a lot of things.

When people ask me what I'm most afraid of, I always answer the same: monkeys and outhouses.

And on a surface level, that's very true. I am actually very afraid of monkeys, and I am very, very afraid of outhouses. I would argue that I have good reason for both of these insane fears. For one, I was attacked by a monkey at a California zoo as a baby. A small monkey bolted over to my stroller, where it proceeded to head butt me and steal my bottle right from my hands.

Yes, that really did happen.

Then when I was 19, I had an incident in an outhouse that involved a pitch dark night and a stranger's poop. At the end of the story, I rode home in my friend's truck, naked and wrapped in a blanket, after shedding all of my clothes on the side of the highway. Needless to say, I now only use outhouses in the broad daylight, I don't shut the door and therefore make someone stand guard outside, and if there is any (and I do mean any) other place to pee, I use it.

Yes, that also really did happen.

People who don't know me well, get that answer. I'm afraid of monkeys and outhouses. And they move forward, not knowing me, thinking that I have two ridiculous stories ending in entertaining fears, and I move forward, letting them think that that's it.

But then there are the people who take the time to know me for real, who know what I am really scared of. The people who have sat with me and a bottle of wine for hours, the people who have invested in me, the people who have been by my side when I've needed them; these are the people who know that my fears go beyond monkeys and outhouses. These are the people who know I am afraid of losing control and of letting someone all the way in.

Those are my real fears, the ones that really give me a run for my money.

I'm afraid of losing control. I talk to my therapist about this one twice a month, on average, more often when I am dealing with a lot of change at once. I have come far enough to recognize it, to feel what triggers it, and to be aware of it...and also to sometimes have a laugh at myself for it. As an example, I recently decided to get a roommate, and I rented half my apartment to a girl who was moving out of her parents' house for the first time. This was ideal for me, because I have furniture and appliances and dishes and decor...and she doesn't. So essentially, our apartment is furnished with my stuff, with the obvious exception of her bedroom. Recently, she acquired a chair. A chair that sits at the dining room table. So, as anyone else would, she put her new chair out in the dining room, and now we have three chairs at the table - two that I bought with the table, that match...and one random one that doesn't. And this chair has become my nemesis. When I am doing dishes, I stare at it. It bothers me. Not because it's ugly, but because it bothers me that someone else's stuff is in my dining room. Now, mind you this person pays rent, is a legal lease holder on our shared apartment, and has every right to buy a chair and put it wherever she wants. And I'm not mad about it by any means; it just bugs me when I think about it. Because really, I just don't want anyone else to have any control over my life, and somehow this damn chair seems to trigger a time in my life where someone else was controlling my entire existence.

And yes, I realize this makes me sound like a total psycho.

I am also afraid of letting someone into my soul far enough that they could hurt me. People do that, the whole hurting other people thing. Sometimes they even do it intentionally. I've had people hurt me on accident, and I've had people hurt me intentionally. And it's definitely the intentional hurting that stays with you; the fact that someone would maliciously seek out a way to cause you pain. But they're out there, those people. So I feel the need to be cautious.

Unfortunately, that need to protect myself, to protect my heart, often gets in my way. And it gets in my way in ways that I don't see coming at first, sometimes not until it's too late. Sometimes I don't even realize I have my emotional arm up, that I am still guarding some part of me, that's I'm keeping my distance. And it's always the worst when someone you care about has to be the one to point it out, like there's someone out there who is working hard enough to get all the way in, that they're the one who notices when you're making it impossible.

Regardless of how scary it is, there comes a point in your life that you have to let your past shit go. When you have to look your fears in the face and say fuck it. When you have to let your roommate buy a chair you don't like and stop looking at it with dismay on your way out the door in the morning. When you have to look at that person who is working their hardest to know you, and make the choice to let them in. Fear will always be there, trying to hold you back, trying to keep you down. Are you going to let it win? Are you going to let your fear win? Or are you going to make a conscious decision to do what you know feels good, despite any fear of failure or heartache or anything else?

It's okay to be afraid of ridiculous things, like monkeys or spiders or public bathrooms. It's even okay to be afraid of real things, like falling in love with someone you could love forever or moving into an apartment with that person, or even walking away from the things you know and trying something new. Fear is a normal thing, a healthy thing. But it's not okay to be controlled by your fear, and it's not okay to let your fears control your life.

I mean, don't get me wrong, I still have no intention of hanging out with any monkeys...

I'm just never gonna be ready for that.